JEDDAH, 1 August — A team of surgeons at a Jeddah hospital recently performed the first brain surgery in the Kingdom without opening the skull.
Professor Essam Emara, head of the neuroscience department at the Saudi German Hospital, who led the team, said the surgery on a 45-year-old Saudi woman was a success thanks to developments in radiosurgery. A brain tumor was operated upon without opening the patient’s skull. The patient had meningeoma and the tumor was compressing her optic and occulomotor nerves that controlled the eye movement, the doctor said.
Dr. Emara said the nerve was running very close to the cavernous sinus. “If we want to get rid of such a tumor by the normal surgical way, even by the microscope, the hazards of injuring the optic and occulomotor nerves are very high. Besides, the cavernous sinus is a very risky venous structure inside the brain. So not only the life of the patient becomes risky but also morbidity may be high. So we put her on radiosurgery, which is considered to be the first ever in the Kingdom,” Dr. Emara added.
The team included Professor Ihab Alnakhouri, consultant oncologist, and physicist Naseem.
In another recent surgery, the Khalid Idriss Hospital reported that a very heavy prostate mass weighing 350 kg was removed successfully from a 72-year-old man. Dr. Hidayatullah Hakim, consultant urologist and Dr. Iqbal Lohia, consultant surgeon, who performed the surgery, said it was the first time that they operated such a huge mass of prostate gland in three decades of their surgical experience. The patient is recovering fast without any post-operative complications.
Dr. Walid K. Idriss, chairman and director of the hospital, said the prostate was the only gland in the body, which progressively enlarged as the age advanced, unlike the other tissues that were slowly regressed with aging. “But the abnormal growth adversely affects the health of an individual and sometimes becomes life threatening.”
The second important complication, according to the doctor, is the difficulty in passing urine because of pressure created by this gland in the enlarged state. There are many factors and reasons for the influence of this abnormal growth including disease conditions.
