A surgical team at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital (SNUBH) became the first in the world to successfully resect the entire thyroid gland of a 5-year-old child by performing the BABA Robot Thyroidectomy, the hospital said.
Bilateral Axillo-Brest Approach (BABA) robotic thyroidectomy is a surgical method to resect the thyroid gland by creating small incision windows of less than 1 centimeter on both the areola and armpits. The world's first robotic thyroidectomy, performed at SNUBH in 2008, has been widely practiced around the world as it has been proven to leave no scars on the neck and fewer side effects such as adhesions, postoperative bleeding, voice changes, and decreased parathyroid function.
Generally, performing robotic thyroid surgery in children is challenging due to the small size of patients limiting the range of motion of the robot’s arms.
However, the surgical team led by Professor Choi June Young of the Surgery Department at SNUBH successfully performed BABA robotic surgery on an 18-kg 5-year-old girl suffering from intractable Graves’ disease, also known as, hyperthyroidism, which cannot be treated with drugs.
This is unprecedented in the world, not just in BABA surgery but in overall robotic thyroid surgery, the hospital said.
The researchers proved that the same conventional surgical techniques that are used in adults can also be applied to pediatric patients as their anatomy and neurology are not significantly different.
Additionally, the surgical team demonstrated that when robotic thyroidectomy is applied to children, parathyroid tissue essential for maintaining blood calcium levels can be more clearly distinguished through cameras, making it easy to preserve during surgery.
However, if the parathyroid gland is damaged during surgery, the child can experience serious side effects such as numbness in the hands and feet, muscle paralysis, and growth disorders, said the researchers.
The diagram shows the surgical set-up of the BABA robotic thyroid surgery. (Source: Head and Neck journal)
"Both the cosmetic advantage of not having a big scar on the neck and the functional advantage of low risk of voice deformation or parathyroid function are very important factors in the growth process of children after surgery," Professor Choi said. “We will continue to accumulate success stories of pediatric robotic surgery and share methodologies so that pediatric patients can enjoy the benefits of robotic surgery more safely."
The surgical procedure was recently published in the international journal, Head and Neck.
Source : KBR(
https://www.koreabiomed.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=20788)
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