Child femur recreated with humerus (2)

(ANSA) - Turin, October 13 - Doctors at Turin's Città della Salute (Health City) complex have managed to replace the femur of a child suffering from a lethal form of bone cancer with a rebuilt one using a reversed humerus from a donor, ANSA sources said on Thursday. The child was six years old at the time of the operation and is now eight and leads a normal life, having finished oncological therapies. It is the first such operation in Italy and there are no precedents in the medical literature of such an intervention being performed previously on such a young child.
    The humerus is a long bone in the arm running from the shoulder to the elbow. It has a nerve near the elbow which is known as 'the funny bone'.
    The femur, or thighbone, is the closest bone to the hip joint.
    The exceptional operation was carried out by the team of Raimondo Piana, head of orthopaedic oncological surgery of the Città della Salute.
    The child was affected by a very rare tumour, with an incidence of around 150 cases a year in Italy.
    The doctors proceeded by removing the so-called distal part of the femur, where it joins the knee.
    They needed to use a humerus instead of a femur because of the child's age and the fact that his knee was so small, doctors explained. The humerus was attached to the femur with a plate and by reconstructing the kneecap and all the ligaments, preserving the patient's tibia.
    Bone cancers in paediatric subjects are rare tumours, the doctors explained.
    Thanks to a multidisciplinary approach - chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery - they have a more favourable prognosis these days compared to the recent past.
    Children who are still growing, furthermore, present problems concerning the reconstruction which has to grow, itself, to avoid having different lengths of the legs in the future.
    The seminal surgery won the first world prize at the prosthetic surgery technology congress held in Boston, United States.
    The surgical success was presented to the congress by doctor Michele Boffano. The scientific work presented focuses in particular on case studies of muscle-skeleton paediatric tumours and was shared with the paediatric oncology department of Turin's Regina Margherita hospital, directed by Doctor Franca Fagioli.