Baby born with no rectal opening treated successfully at Thane hospital

Thane (Maharashtra): In a rare case, a one-year-old male child born without an anus and other complications has been successfully treated by the doctors at the Wockhardt Hospitals in Thane, officials said on Wednesday.

Child specialists Bhavesh Doshi and Nitu Mundhra treated the child with a condition called ‘Ano Rectal Malformation’ (ARM), meaning the baby had no rectal opening.

Additionally, the child’s tongue was stuck to the floor of the mouth (tongue-tie), and he had a twisted penis with the urinary outlet not in the correct place or Hypospadias.

The newborn's parents -- identified as the Salian couple -- were shocked to learn of these issues in their first child, whom the doctors admitted to the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and put on parenteral nutrition as breastfeeding was not feasible.

Mundhra said ARM is rare, seen just once in about a lakh deliveries, and in the delivery room, all the newborn babies are thoroughly examined from head to toe to detect any abnormalities, especially if they are born with a problem.

“In this baby, when we detected ARM, we checked him thoroughly and found the tongue-tie which could affect his feeding and lead to speech difficulties and also Hypospadias. After counselling the parents, the baby underwent multiple surgeries,” said Mundhra.

These included five procedures like colostomy, anal reconstruction, colostomy closure to address issues of ARM, plus the surgery for Hypospadias and tongue-tie.

The ARM correction was done in three surgical steps, comprising a temporary opening to allow passage of stool and enable the baby to feed. Two months later, a four-hour-long operation was performed to create a new anus at the normal position, and after two more months, another surgery was performed for colostomy closure.

During this surgery, the opening created in the abdominal wall was closed and the baby now passes motions normally from the opening, said the medicos.

Eight months after the surgery, the child underwent a major surgery for Hypospadias to get the urinary opening in the normal position, which was also successful and the child can now pass urine without any difficulty.

Now the child is one year old and functions like other kids of his age after undergoing five surgeries in the first 12 months of his life.