New Options Can Spare Women From Hysterectomy
March 28, 2000 (San Diego) -- Doctors at Stanford University are using established techniques in new ways to treat one of the most common gynecologic complaints as well as one of the most serious obstetrical conditions. Researchers say these procedures can spare women from having hysterectomies, either to prevent problems from uterine fibroids or to spare their lives when they hemorrhage after delivering a baby.
Mahmood Razavi, MD, and his colleagues combined two techniques to treat 10 patients who had a high risk of hemorrhaging during childbirth, which can be fatal. The standard treatment in these cases, if medications fail, is for doctors to remove the uterus. In this study, Razavi and his co-workers inserted a few tiny balloons through a catheter into the groins of these patients just before delivery. They then moved the balloons up to some arteries in the uterus.
"Then the obstetrician delivers the baby, and if the patient bleeds, we inflate the balloons, which instantaneously blocks the blood flow and stops the bleeding," Razavi tells WebMD. This gives doctors time to perform the second part of the procedure: injecting a harmless substance called Gelfoam into the bleeding arteries to block them off.
That process, known as embolization, takes 20-30 minutes, Razavi says. The balloons are used to stop the bleeding first, he says, because "we can't let the patient bleed for that period of time." So far, 10 women have undergone this two-step procedure, and the uterus was spared in nine.
"This procedure could easily be available in community hospitals, because these are fundamental techniques that use equipment we can just pull off the shelves," says Razavi, an assistant professor of radiology at Stanford University. Since it requires close collaboration between an obstetrician and an interventional radiologist, "the biggest barriers are awareness on the part of the obstetrician and the willingness of the radiologist to get up in the middle of the night, since children come when they come."
Patient satisfaction is high, he reports: "I still get phone calls and Christmas cards from some of my patients, and several of them have become pregnant again."