A three-week-old infant was saved by doctors who used superglue to treat an aneurysm, according to the Latin Times. The infant, Ashlyn Julian, was treated by medical professionals at the University of Kansas Hospital for an aneurysm that was causing bleeding in her brain.
The aneurysm was extremely rare, according to Dr. Koji Ebersole, a neurosurgeon at the hospital. Usually, aneurysms take years to develop. There aren't tools to treat the condition that are small enough to use on an infant, which is what led the doctors to use superglue.
The infant suffered a traumatic hemorrhage last week. That usually requires a surgery where the skull is opened, which is the procedure typically used on adults. The hospital assembled a team of doctors from several different hospitals for the case, and the doctors made the decision to work on her brain from the inside.
"We did not know what the right answer was," Ebersole said. "This was not a textbook case.
""If you try to treat the baby without closing the aneurysm...most of those babies don't survive," Ebersole continued. "So we had a strong reason to develop a plan to close the aneurysm."
The surgeons inserted a ting catheter into a blood vessel in the infant's right hip. They then navigated the catheter through her blood vessels and up to her neck and on to her brain. The doctors got the catheter near the aneurysm and deposited sterile surgical superglue on the blood vessel and created an internal cast to seal the blood vessel and stop the bleeding.
"It's literally the same compound as the superglue you'd find in the store," Ebersole said.
The procedure took less than 45 minutes to complete.
"I can't express how incredibly lucky and graced we are," Gina Julian, the mother of the infant, said.
Doctors will look at her again in six months, but think she will make a full recovery.
"I think she's going to have a perfectly normal life," Ebersole said.
News report on the surgery.
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