Surgery rewires bladder control
StudySpina bifida patients are benefiting

By The Associated Press

Published: November 16, 2008

WASHINGTON — It’s a delicate and daring experiment: Could doctors switch a nerve in the leg to make it operate the bladder instead?

Families of a few U.S. children whose spina bifida robs them of bladder control dared to try it — and early results suggest the surgery may help.

With the surgical technique, pioneered in China, a child’s lumbar nerve that acts in the thigh is connected in the spine to a sacral nerve that normally squeezes the bladder.

By scratching the thigh, some youngsters are starting to feel those need-to-go sensations their birth defect always prevented.

"It feels like this little chill kind of thing in me,” marvels 9-year-old Billy Kraser of Scranton, Pa.

"When he goes in there and he’s dry and he’s clean, it’s such a triumph,” adds his mother, Janice Kraser.

Spina bifida occurs when the spinal column fails to close. The birth defect affects about 1,300 babies a year, with varying degrees of leg paralysis.

Your thoughts!