Da Nang Hospital said it has removed a spinal tumour from a 37-year-old American man with severe obesity, Báo Đà Nẵng reported on 4 November. The newspaper did not give an exact surgery date, saying only that the operation was recent.
According to the report, the patient is 1.95 metres tall and weighs 165 kilograms, a body mass index of about 43.3. He had suffered lower-back pain spreading to the left leg, numbness, weakness and difficulty walking for more than a year. An MRI showed a tumour of about three centimetres at the L2 vertebra, close to the conus medullaris and the cauda equina nerve roots.
Surgeons from the hospital's neurosurgery and anaesthesia-resuscitation departments performed a microsurgical removal that lasted about three hours, with intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring, the report says. The tumour was removed completely. Two days later the man could stand, walk and look after himself, and no neurological complications had been reported at the time of writing.
The newspaper put the cost at the hospital at roughly 20 million to 30 million dong for this case. It cited an estimated 35,000 to 60,000 US dollars (about 910 million to 1.56 billion dong) for comparable microsurgery paid out of pocket in the United States. Those figures come from the hospital's account of the case, not an independent comparison, and the patient is not named in the report.
Sources
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