Rare brain abnormality cured via radiosurgery

The patient had come to the hospital’s OPD complaining of recently experiencing nervousness and numbness in the left side of body, doctors said.

NEW DELHI: A 39-year-old man suffering from arteriovenous malformation — an abnormal connection between arteries and veins in the brain — got a new lease of life after undergoing a “challenging” surgery, said Max Super Speciality Hospital in Shalimar Bagh on Thursday.

The patient had come to the hospital’s OPD complaining of recently experiencing nervousness and numbness in the left side of body, doctors said. His vitals were within normal limits, and his 2D echocardiography and colour doppler also showed normal.

However, an MRI of the brain angio (blood vessels) detected a cluster of vessels in the left side of the brain, which is a sign of arteriovenous malformation (AVM), they said.

Calling this an extremely high-risk case, doctors at the hospital in Shalimar Bagh successfully treated the male patient, using frameless stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) technique.

What made the case particularly complex was it being impossible to operate on the patient without him being rendered handicapped for life. However, doctors achieved this feat of completely treating him and that too in just a single sitting, it said.

“We went ahead with the stereotactic radiosurgery as there were high chances of him becoming handicapped if any kind of invasive neurosurgery was done,” said Dr Rajendra Kumar, director and head of department, Radiation Oncology, Max Super Speciality Hospital, Shalimar Bagh.

“We counselled the patient and his family members, who agreed to go in for radiosurgery. We also discussed his MR brain angiography with our radiology colleagues. The size of the AVM was 20x18mm and we treated the patient with frameless radiosurgery,” he said.

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