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New technique helps Mumbai girl back to her feet

Snehal can walk thanks to a rare hip surgery attempted by Mumbai surgeon.

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Lying on her bed in Bombay Hospital, 11-year-old Snehal Landge, who hails from the interiors of Maharashtra, has been diagnosed with a disorder she can’t even pronounce.

She suffers from Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis (SCFE), a rare pediatric and adolescent hip disorder that affects 2 out of 10,000 children and refers to a fracture through the physis (the growth plate).

But she will be able to walk normally thanks to a unique surgery performed for the first time in the city, wherein surgeons deliberately dislocated her hip joint in order to fix it.

“The ball of the hip joint slips within the neck of the hip joint, instead of sitting squarely on it. SCFE results in loss of a range of movement in the hip joint,” explains Dr Tushar Agrawal, paediatric orthopaedist and spine surgeon, Bombay Hospital.

Dr Agrawal says that earlier, surgeons would try to avoid an invasive procedure to avoid any possibility of loss of blood supply to the hip joint. “There was a fear that we were actually destroying the hip, and in the long-run, the hip would not function properly.

We had to try to keep the hip joint as it is and try to treat it from the outside,” says Dr Agrawal, who found the results of the procedure unsatisfactory. Dr Agrawal learnt of a unique method of treating this problem, developed by German orthopaedist, Professor R Ganz, known as ‘safe surgical dislocation of the hip joint’.

So he decided to try that instead.

Under the new procedure, doctors first deliberately dislocated the hip joint, while preserving the blood supply, before finally fixing the joint.

Safe dislocation of the hip, he says, gives the surgeon full visualisation and the ability to realign the joint completely. “An accurate diagnosis and immediate surgery is the key to effective treatment,” he says. He further informs that this technology can be applied to patients with other conditions like FAI (Femoro Ascetabular Infringement) and infringement syndromes of the hips, Perthe’s disease, benign tumours of the hip joint, and so on.

Patients, usually in the age group of 12 to 22, who suffer from SCFE complain of hip pain, thigh pain, knee pain.

They are generally referred to a knee specialist or a spine surgeon, making diagnosis difficult. In Snehal’s case too, she was first referred to a spine surgeon who then referred her to Dr Agrawal. “That is why we run a free out-patient department (OPD) at Bombay Hospital every Tuesday and Thursday from 9 am to 12 pm for patients who are below poverty line. Surgery as well as implant, material and medicines are offered free of cost,” says Dr Agrawal.

(Those interested can call Bombay Hospital on 22067676 and ask for ‘Free OPD’)

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