spina bifida baby / The child with the "tail" because of the spina bifida

The child with the "tail"
because of the spina bifida



(Corbis)


Nuo Nuo is a five-month-old boy from Changsha, in central-southern China, born with the "tail". Because Nuo Nuo has spina bifida, a disease that involves the failure to close the spine and, in some cases, allows the spinal cord to leak and the membranes that cover it, the meninges. His mother noticed the small protuberance at the back of her back a few days after her birth but now, five months later, the "tail" of Nuo Nuo is now five centimeters long.

The baby will be operated

The doctors will operate Nuo Nuo, but his is not the first case of "tail" from spina bifida. The medical literature reports of other small patients born with a congenital protuberance due to the disease: often they are "queues" of smaller size, operated successfully within the first months of life as in a case discussed last October on the pages of APSP Journal of Case Reports or in the three children recently talked about by Brazilian specialists on Case Reports in Pediatrics. One of these did not have a real tail but excrescences in other points of the spine: in patients with spina bifida, in fact, hernias can also occur at the vertebrae level, because the posterior arches move away allowing the soft tissues (bone marrow and meninges) to escape.

Motor disabilities and intellectual impairments

The spina bifida depends on the failure to close the neural tube, which usually occurs around the end of the first month of gestation: the causes are numerous and there are both genetic risk factors and elements related to the mother's health, as the presence of hyperglycemia and obesity increase the danger to the child. The opening of the vertebral column leads to the spillage of the marrow and the stretching of the spinal nerves: all this seriously compromises the integrity of the nervous system and can cause motor disabilities, intellectual deficit, deformity of the spine, a greater probability of meningitis and infections brain. Then there exists the "occult spina bifida", in which the lack of fusion of the vertebral bones that surround the marrow occurs at the level of the last lumbar vertebra or the first sacral: it is much less serious, because the hernias that are formed are small and often even they do not give symptoms (sometimes they are associated to lipomas, in or small tufts of hair on the skin, in some cases they can manifest themselves with slight bladder dysfunctions).

Folic acid in pregnancy

The congenital defects of the spine in their different forms, serious and less severe, affect about one child every 1,500; the good news is that they can be prevented because it is known that spina bifida is associated with a low level of folic acid in the mother's blood. Assuming in adequate quantities, in fact, prevents 75-90 percent of cases, including the most severe; however, even if some foods (including citrus fruits, bananas, milk, legumes, whole grains) are rich in folates, many women are unable to introduce enough folic acid during pregnancy. This is why all women who would like to have a child or do not rule out the possibility is recommended to take folic acid as a supplement (0.4 milligrams a day) for at least a month before conception and during the first three months of gestation .