Story By: John Feng, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report
This is the string of invasive tumours experts have removed from an elderly woman’s spine after they grew inside her vertebrae and compressed her nerves.
A recently released report by the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine includes MRI scans showing the string of bead-like growths discovered in 69-year-old Ms He’s spinal canal in June this year.
The patient complained of back pain which crept down her left leg. She thought she had common intervertebral disc degeneration, which can cause very similar symptoms.
However, hospital scans shocked doctors when they revealed more than 10 tumours – measuring 14 centimetres (5.5 inches) in length – growing inside the woman’s spinal canal in a rare case of schwannomatosis.
The condition is characterised by nerve tissue tumours – called schwannomas – which usually grow on the spine and peripheral nerves.
Head neurosurgeon Zhu Yongjian said: “We deal with more than 300 spinal tumour cases every year, but it was extremely rare to see more than 10 growing in a line like this.
“The tumours compress the nerves inside the narrow spinal canal, producing symptoms similar to intervertebral disc degeneration, but they are treated in very different ways.
“As the tumours increased in size, the compression-induced symptoms will no longer have been treatable with rest or medication alone.
“They could have caused serious nerve damage if not immediately removed.”
Doctor Zhu and his team opted against traditional surgical methods which would have called for a 20-centimetre (7.8-inch) incision and an inspection of five vertebrae in order to expose the full length of the tumours.
The hospital said this would have caused excess trauma to the elderly woman’s body and impeded her recovery.
Instead, the operation relied on microsurgery and two small incisions at the top and bottom of the string of tumours.
Two fingernail-sized vertebral plate sections were cut from the woman’s spine as the string of growths were removed intact.
Subsequent MRI scans showed no residue tumours inside Ms He’s spine, and she is already up and walking on her own, the hospital said.
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