Doctors from Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children fix urethral disorder
Chennai : Pediatric surgeons at the Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children (ICH) stated that the clinic has started a unit dedicated to the correction of Hypospadias — a urethral disorder found in newborn baby boys. Pediatricians who treated 70 such children in the last six months observed that the urethral opening in the ventral penile shaft in the newly born baby boy where the urine passes from an abnormal opening on the undersurface of the penis is its first identification point.
However, the urethral disorder that is found in one in every 250 newly born males has been successfully treated in a single surgery, called as single stage urethroplasty at the ICH, Egmore, surgeons said. “Of the 70 children, 37 had severe hypospadias and all of them were fully corrected in a single surgery that took just 3 hours and 30 minutes,” said Professor R. Velmurugan, who led the surgeries for the past few months under the guidance of Professor S.V. Senthilnathan, Head of the Department of Pediatric surgery.
Full correction in one surgery is difficult to achieve and we are proud of having done the same in a large series of consecutive cases, he added. If left untreated, the child, in his adolescence will have to squat to pass urine and the penis bends on erection, and this will lead to the child being physically and psychologically scarred, warned pediatric surgeons at a press meet held at ICH on Wednesday.
Earlier, cases of Hypospadias required multiple surgeries on the same child on the urinary glands that left scars and required more tissues from the foreskin to heal it. This eventually led to complications as it could affect blood vessels, confirmed Dr Chitra Ayyappan, director of ICH. All the cases were done free of cost under the Chief Minister’s health insurance scheme. Otherwise, it would cost nearly Rs 1.25 lakh, the press release from ICH stated.
“My child’s urine stream was quite abnormal. I had to take him to a private hospital where they said it would cost nearly Rs 1 lakh and he would have to undergo more than one surgery,” said P. Bhagyalakshmi, mother of three-year-old Jagannath Harish who successfully underwent surgery a week ago. She also added that they were able to leave the clinic soon after surgery. Surgeons suggest that the ideal time for surgery is within the first two years of the child’s birth and parents of children with Hypospadias need to be reassured that single stage correction is feasible as later on it leads to complications.
