A new treatment brings a new lease on life

For many engaged couples, the months preceding their nuptials are filled with joy, excitement and anticipation – and the occasional stress. For one young Houston-area couple, however, the six months leading up to the walk down the aisle were clouded by fear and uncertainty when a medical emergency threatened their plans.

Fortunately, a new option in the treatment of brain aneurysms, performed under the expertise of Dr. Naser Jaleel, cerebrovascular neurosurgeon with Baylor Medicine and Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, gave Morgan Peterson and her fiancé a new lease on life.

“At first, I didn’t really realize anything was wrong,” Peterson recalls. “I had an incident at home where I stood up and suddenly felt really dizzy. My vision went black and blurry, and I had shooting pains up my back that lasted about an hour.”

A team at a local urgent care clinic diagnosed Peterson with muscle spasms and prescribed her muscle relaxers. Her symptoms subsided, until one random afternoon a few months later when she fainted at home.

“My fiancé and I had just moved into a new apartment, and we were getting stuff situated when I suddenly passed out.” Through secondhand accounts, Peterson recounts being taken to a nearby hospital where it was determined she had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. Within an hour, she was rushed to Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in the world-renowned Texas Medical Center.

It was at St. Luke’s that Jaleel took over Peterson’s care. Stabilizing his young patient was the neurosurgeon’s first task. “When a patient comes in with a complex ruptured aneurysm, our initial goal is to secure the ruptured portion of the aneurysm before we can provide more definitive treatment. In Ms. Peterson’s case, we first treated the aneurysm by placing coils to secure it in the short term.”

On follow-up, Jaleel noticed the aneurysm had increased in size. Given the precarious location of the aneurysm, he elected to proceed with a minimally invasive, endovascular approach rather than a more invasive open surgery for aneurysm clipping. “Ms. Peterson’s enlarging aneurysm was located close to the brain stem and surrounded by delicate nerves and small blood vessels. Because open surgery in this location has a higher risk of neurological complications, we elected to treat the aneurysm using the endovascular approach.”

Jaleel decided Peterson was the perfect candidate for a novel treatment that utilized a new device – a Medtronic Pipeline Vantage 21 flow diverting stent – that can reconstruct a blood vessel as small as pencil lead (about 1 millimeter).

“Traditional flow-diverting stents are made for large arteries approximately 4 millimeters wide. The novelty of this case was that we were able to use a new device that was suitable for small vessels. Flow-diverting stents function like a scaffold over which our body builds a new blood vessel lining. This effectively seals off blood flow into the aneurysm, resulting in aneurysm cure. The outcome is complete reconstruction of the blood vessel without having to do a traditional open vascular neurosurgery.”

While it took some time for her short-term memory to return, and the damage from the initial rupture left Peterson with residual numbness in her right arm, the bride-to-be was able to return to normal, even carrying on with pre-wedding festivities uninterrupted.

“When I was discharged from the ICU, my bridal shower was two weeks away, and my bachelorette party was scheduled for a few months after that. My family asked me if we needed to cancel, and I said, ‘No, let’s get it done.’”

The couple was married soon after and have been enjoying their life together, with a renewed focus on what matters most. “I have always been a big family person, but I think going through this experience made me emphasize my family and close friends – those who helped me throughout this journey – that much more.”

Peterson’s case was only the second of its kind in Texas, and it also was Jaleel who successfully performed the first. For the neurosurgeon, the milestone “is a testament to the work that we do here at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center and the complexity of patients we see. Whenever new instrumentation is debuted, industry leaders want to make sure the product will be used well, so this technology was available to us because of our record of success with very complex cases.”

Learn more about cerebrovascular neurosurgery at Baylor Medicine or call the Department of Neurosurgery at 713-798-4696.

By Cristina Flores, senior communications associate in the Department of Neurosurgery