There’s a procedure for children that have a significant difference in the length of their legs. Shriners Children’s Texas can use this operation to help prevent kids from a lifetime of hip and back problems.
As always, Shriners Children’s Hospitals do these complicated procedures for children, for free, and the doctor is worried that not enough patients who need this know it’s an option.
15-year-old Emmanual Acosta is like 1,500 kids born every year in the U.S. He has one leg shorter than the other.
“When I was born, I was perfectly fine but as the bones start to stretch out and grow, they noticed that there was a little bit of a unevenness,” Emmanual Acosta explained.
His mother waited patiently for a treatment that could help his legs be the same length. She had seen the operation on the news when Emmanual was little, but it wasn’t available to her in Houston until recently.
When Dr. John Ferris arrived at Shriners Children’s Texas, he began performing an orthopedic operation to stretch the bones. This technique is a huge improvement from previous methods which would cut through the muscle and tissue, creating a tremendous amount of pain. With the technique done by Dr. Ferris, he said there’s almost no pain post-surgery.
“A kid may have a little bit of cramping like growing pains but that would be gone by the end of the day,” Dr. Ferris said.
Here’s how it works:
Dr. John Ferris uses the body’s natural ability to heal. He inserts a nail inside the thighbone. There is a magnet inside the nail. With an external magnet, the patient can rotate the magnet inside the bone from home.
The magnets interact causing spinning of the magnets in the nail which turns small gears that extend the rod. The goal is to stretch the bone one millimeter a day.
“For about two minutes, three times a day, they take an external device that has magnets in it and they place it over the implant (and the external device has magnets in it that affect magnets inside the nail) and slowly over the course stretch that,” Dr. Ferris said. “We do it in what we call pulses. So, three times a day they would do a pulse until the femur, they would have a millimeter at the end of that day.”
If you go too fast or too slow, the operation won’t be a success. So, regular x-rays are necessary.
“We have to constantly monitor how quickly we’re stretching. If we stretch too fast, then it’s similar to pulling taffy quickly and it gets too narrow and we want to keep the bone the proper width,” Dr. Ferris said.
For Emmanuel, he’s in the middle of his first and second surgery but he knows it’s working.
“Two months after... I noticed that my leg was touching the ground at the same time while my other leg was fully stretched out,” he said. “I smiled and I was happy.”
Because of the size rod and the level of participation needed from the patient, this is an operation that works best during the teen years.