Doctors remove brain tumour after 8-hour surgery

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23.03.2021 

Doctors remove brain tumour after 8-hour surgery

Doctors at Rainbow Children’s Hospital, Chennai, removed a large tumor from the base of the skull of a four-year-old boy from the Middle East, through a complex surgery that spanned over eight hours. The tumor had caused a blockage in the circulation of fluid in the brain and had also affected the boy’s ability to see in the left eye, an official release said. The child was brought to the hospital with symptoms of headache, impaired vision, appetite loss and vomiting. After performing an MRI scan and other allied tests, the patient was found to have a large ‘tennis ball-sized’ tumor in his skull base, which was compressing the nerves to his eyes. The tumor was a large hypothalamic chiasmatic glioma. These uncommon tumors account for about 3% of childhood brain tumors. Adults almost never have this kind of tumor. The treatment of these tumors is very challenging due to the presence of many vital brain structures in the tumor’s vicinity. A team of doctors at the hospital decided to do a surgery using a complex skull base approach to remove the tumor. This surgery is used in adult patients to treat brain and sinus cancers but is rarely used in children. The patient was wheeled into the operation theatre for an eighthour-long surgery, wherein the tumor was completely removed with the preservation of his vision as well as his pituitary gland. The accumulated brain fluid was also released, thereby abating the need for a shunt surgery.

City hospital receives JCI accreditation: MGM Healthcare announced on Monday that it has received the prestigious Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation, which is considered the gold standard in healthcare worldwide. An extensive on-site audit was conducted at the hospital by a team of international expert surveyors. They assessed the hospital’s patient safety goals, patient assessment and care, anaesthesia and surgical care, medication management, patient and family education, quality improvement, infection prevention and control, among others.