Doctors Disconnect Half of 6-Year-Old Girl’s Brain to Stop Seizures

• Doctors performed a 10-hour hemispherectomy on a 6-year-old Southern California girl last month.
• Brianna Bodley suffered from regular seizures as a result of a rare chronic inflammatory disease.
• The procedure will allow Brianna to lead a normal life even though only half of her brain is “on.”

A 6 year old girl recovery She underwent a 10-hour procedure in which doctors severed half of her brain to eliminate her daily seizures.

Six-year-old Brianna Bodley will spend the rest of her life with only half of her brain “on,” according to media reports. But her doctors say that despite the situation, she will soon be able to lead a completely normal life.

“After the surgery, the entire left side of her body lost power,” said Brianna’s mother, Crystal Bodley. KABCa local outlet in Los Angeles.

Crystal Bodley was first diagnosed with epilepsy in August 2022 after suffering a series of seizures last year, writes Crystal Bodley. GoFundMe page For her daughter. A month later, doctors diagnosed Brianna with Rasmussen’s encephalitis. Rasmussen’s encephalitis is an extremely rare neurological disease that usually affects only half of the brain.

Rasmussen’s disease is a chronic inflammatory disease most common in children under 10 years of age. Doctors initially tried treating Brianna with anti-seizure drugs and steroids, but the disease continued to progress slowly, KABC reported.

If left untreated, children can be left with some degree of paralysis, cognitive impairment, and language impairment, according to the National Institutes of Health.

According to KABC, Dr. Aaron Robison, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Loma Linda University Health, told Brianna’s worried parents that her brain was shrinking due to damage from the seizure.

He recommended that half of Brianna’s brain be shut down.

“Simply by disconnecting it could completely stop the disease and essentially cure it,” Robison told the magazine.

Doctors previously removed half of the brain, but that procedure can have serious side effects, Robison said. It is easier to cut out the half of the brain that is not functioning.

On September 28, Brianna underwent a 10-hour hemispherectomy.

“It was a long 10 hours,” Crystal Bodley said. CNN.

The left side of her brain is now supplementing the disconnected right side and thinking about how it needs to compensate in order to live a fulfilling life.

An Oct. 3 update on Brianna’s GoFundMe page states that Brianna has left the ICU and is recovering at a children’s hospital. She will need to undergo intense inpatient rehabilitation to learn how to walk again and move her arms, her mother wrote.

Brianna may never regain her fine motor skills in her left hand or her peripheral vision in her left eye. But Robison told CNN that the procedure did not change the girl’s personality in any way, she said.

“Even after cutting out half of her brain, Brianna remains the same person,” he says.