The teenager Charleston Roberto de Oliveira Mayer Junior, 17 years old, needed to go under a major and delicate surgery in the spine during the coronavirus pandemic, to correct a severe scoliosis. The boy has a rare disease called Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which affects only boys and is characterized by the lack of a protein in the muscles that helps keep the muscle cells healthy. As a result, this disease causes a progressive weakening of all the muscles in the body, affecting important developmental milestones such as sitting, standing, or walking.

The surgery, performed in July, was inevitable, but the family questioned whether that was the best time to do it, because of the coronavirus pandemic. “When the surgery was scheduled, we were at the high point of the pandemic. We thought about postponing, because we felt very afraid. But a conversation with the doctors calmed us down, because they explained to us about all the protocols adopted in order to separate the patients with COVID-19 from the others. After these conversations, we were reassured,” tells the mother. And the family could see in practice what the doctors had informed in previous conversations.

And in the seventh edition of the Pequeno Príncipe News in 2021 you will learn more details about the specific hospitalization flows for patients with COVID-19, which guarantee everyone’s safety. This edition also presents an article about the Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes). In partnership with the Pequeno Príncipe College, the Hospital has become a hub for the initiative in Brazil. Through online meetings between specialists and health professionals who have an interest in the themes proposed in the teleclinics, the purpose is democratizing and demobilizing the academic knowledge in medicine for remote or neglected areas.

The third article of Pequeno Príncipe News is about an important achievement: the Flow Cytometry Sector, integrated into the institution’s Genomic Laboratory, has been certified for the level of excellence in performing the evaluation of minimal residual disease (MRD) in B-lineage acute lymphoblastic leukemias (B-ALL). With the recognition, the unit is part of a select group of the first ten laboratories in Brazil certified by the qualification of its processes by the EuroFlow international protocol, which requires highly standardized technical procedures.

Click here and read the full-length articles in the seventh edition of the Pequeno Príncipe News in 2021.