It appears to work! Final week, a staff in Switzerland shared information {that a} child boy had been born after his mom had the process. Child Lucien was the fifth child to be born after the surgical procedure and the primary in Europe, says Daniela Huber, the gyno-oncologist who carried out the operation. Since then, a minimum of three others have been born, provides Reitan Ribeiro, the surgeon who pioneered the process. They advised me the main points.
Huber’s affected person was 28 years previous when a four-centimeter tumor was found in her rectum. Medical doctors at Sion Hospital in Switzerland, the place Huber works, beneficial a course of remedy that included a number of drugs and radiotherapy—the usage of beams of vitality to shrink a tumor—earlier than surgical procedure to take away the tumor itself.
This sort of radiation can kill tumor cells, however it might probably additionally injury different organs within the pelvis, says Huber. That features the ovaries and uterus. Individuals who endure these remedies can decide to freeze their eggs beforehand, however the hurt prompted to the uterus will imply they’ll by no means be capable of carry a being pregnant, she provides. Injury to the liner of the uterus may make it tough for a fertilized egg to implant there, and the muscle tissues of the uterus are left unable to stretch, she says.
On this case, the girl determined that she did need to freeze her eggs. However it could have been tough to make use of them additional down the road—surrogacy is prohibited in Switzerland.
Huber provided her an alternate.
She had been following the work of Ribeiro, a gynecologist oncologist previously on the Erasto Gaertner Hospital in Curitiba, Brazil. There, Ribeiro had pioneered a brand new kind of surgical procedure that concerned transferring the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries from their place within the pelvis and briefly tucking them away within the higher stomach, beneath the ribs.
Ribeiro and his colleagues revealed their first case report in 2017, describing a 26-year-old with a rectal tumor. (Ribeiro, who’s now primarily based at McGill College in Montreal, says the girl had been advised by a number of docs that her most cancers remedy would destroy her fertility and had pleaded with him to discover a solution to protect it.)
