New Laser Eye-Treatment Technique Finds Its Way to Far Flung Sakhalin Island in East Russia
On Sakhalin, the newest technologies for restoring vision to young children began to be used. Among the patients, there are newborns and even premature babies with severe pathologies. Before it, the child was to be taken to a neighboring region to make such an operation or specialists were to be invited to the island. Now, everything is done at the local hospital.
Alexander Krasnopyorov is reporting.
Little Valeria was born 3 months earlier and weighed less than a kilogram. Doctors found out that she had retinopathy, the eye retina choroid disease. She could have gone blind. A month after her birth, the girl underwent a surgery, and now, her mom happily notes improvements in her state.
Natalya Taksanova: "She follows hands, colorful objects. She reacts to the voice. If her nurse and I stand around her, she follows the speaker with her eyes. She recognizes me, everything is fine".
Laser coagulation is the only means to fight developing blindness of newborns. The doctor connects the eye retina and the choroid with the laser. The operations itself requires general anesthesia and lasts from 40 minutes to two hours. The treatment's effectiveness can be estimated in one week.
Yevgeniya Galkina, ophthalmologist: "The children are very small, the smallest we operated weighed 1 kilogram and 200 grams at the moment of the surgery. These children are complicated, they have many cardio-vascular pathologies, they have difficulties breathing".
They used to be able to perform the eye retina laser coagulation surgery only in Khabarovsk. As far as it's not always possible to transport premature babies by plane, a specialist came to the island. At the end of 2017, as part of the healthcare modernization, the regional children's hospital spent 3.5 million roubles on new equipment.
Larisa Fateyeva, Head Doctor: "Each visit of the specialist has its difficulties. First of all, weather conditions, secondly, specialists have their own jobs, and they might have no time to come here and help. And help might be needed immediately, at this very moment".
The regional children's hospital has recently held 10 such operations, and the four last ones — using its own resources. The second hospital's ophthalmologist will also learn how to use the new equipment in 2018.
Alexander Krasnopyorov, Pavel Kuksov, Vesti, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands