April 8, 2024

On a beautiful Saturday in February, Texas Children’s Fetal Center brought current and former patients and their families together for a special occasion at the Houston Zoo. The Fetal Center Family Reunion has been a cherished experience for both families and staff alike since 2007, serving as a celebration of life and chance for attendees to reconnect, share progress and spend time together.

“It is incredibly fulfilling to see the children that our former fetal surgery patients have grown to become,” said clinical nurse coordinator Annie Southworth. “We see these children before they are even born, and being able to talk to them years later leaves us encouraged about our work continuing to make a difference for these families.

“The family reunion is an essential event celebrating our inspiring families and their outcomes,” added advanced quality specialist Angel Krueger. “It’s a small way we can give back to our patients and families for placing their trust in our care.”

Over 75 families, including 250+ people from nine different states and Mexico, registered for this year’s reunion event, the first one held since COVID-19. Many Texas Children’s team members, including physicians and surgeons from different departments, attended and volunteered to make the reunion a success. In addition to experiencing the zoo’s animals and exhibits, the event featured fun games and activities like face painting and cornhole.

“The care we received was top-notch” and nothing short of a miracle, said the mother of twins treated for twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS). “Texas Children’s really saved their lives, they wouldn’t be here had it not been for our care team.”

“I’m really happy to see kids like me,” said one former spina bifida repair patient at the event. His mother added that they still see the same Texas Children’s providers today, ten years later.

Click through the gallery below to see more photos from the family reunion.

November 18, 2021

Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women opens a new community clinic location, bringing top tier women’s health care closer to patients who live in the Bay Area. Read more

July 7, 2021

Seven years after performing the world’s first successful two-port fetoscopic surgery to treat spina bifida, Texas Children’s surgeons have performed the100th surgery of its kind.

Dr. Michael Belfort, OB/GYN-in-chief at Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women, and Dr. William Whitehead, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Texas Children’s, developed the fetal surgery technique, which presents less risk to the mother and less risk of prematurity to the baby.

The condition occurs when a fetus’ neural tube fails to close during the first month of pregnancy, and can cause children to have difficulty walking, to need a shunt to drain cerebral fluid, and more.

“This milestone is very exciting and has been years in the making at Texas Children’s,” said Belfort, who is also professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine.

“Fetal surgery for spina bifida improves the baby’s chances of being able to walk and decreases the need for a shunt to drain fluid from the baby’s brain. Our procedure allows the mother the chance of a normal term delivery and reduces her risk of the type of complications that may be seen with the open uterus approach,” Belfort said. “We hope that our outcomes will inspire other physicians to use this technique to improve spina bifida care across the world.”

Belfort and Whitehead began to develop and practice their method in 2011, before performing the procedure on a patient three years later. At the time, the then-investigational surgery began a research study overseen by the Institutional Review Board at Baylor College of Medicine, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a Data Safety Monitoring Board and the Texas Children’s Hospital Fetal Therapy Board. Now, the procedure is standard of care for eligible patients at Texas Children’s.

“I am so proud of Dr. Belfort, Dr. Whitehead and the entire Texas Children’s Fetal Center team for this incredible accomplishment,” said President and CEO Mark A. Wallace. “Improving the quality of life for even one mother and child is reason enough to be proud, but 100 successful surgeries truly shows the consistent expertise of our team. Reaching this remarkable milestone is only the beginning, and I know the team will continue to take care of the children and women who need us the most while innovating new lifesaving treatments.”

Currently, the typical procedure to treat spina bifida prenatally is an open procedure, where the spine is repaired through a 7 to 10 centimeter opening made in the uterus. Women who undergo this procedure need a preterm cesarean delivery for this and all future pregnancies to avoid uterine rupture.

Instead, Belfort and Whitehead’s method allows mothers to deliver around 38 weeks instead of 34 to 35 weeks, and about half have a vaginal delivery.

“The benefits to the mother are what convinced me to be part of this fetoscopic program, and I am even more pleased now to see that the later gestational age at birth also has benefits for the baby,” said Whitehead, who is also a professor of neurosurgery at Baylor.

Now, Belfort and Whitehead are training physicians from across the world to perform the procedure.

“There are babies on four continents and more than 12 countries who have benefited from the fetoscopic approach. We hope to continue improving spina bifida outcomes for children and mothers, wherever they may be,” Belfort said. “We are looking forward to innovating additional fetal surgeries to address other life-limiting or life-threatening congenital anomalies.”

May 18, 2021

During Lauren Bailey’s routine 20-week anatomy scan in October 2020, her OB/GYN noticed an abnormal growth on her placenta. It was a chorioangioma, a benign, vascular tumor. Read more

March 12, 2020

On March 7, Texas Children’s Fetal Center held a successful patient reunion at Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women. Families from around the country traveled to Houston to reconnect with Fetal Center physicians, nurse coordinators and staff.

Since its inaugural event in 2007, the reunion provides an opportunity for physicians and staff to reunite with patient families who received life-saving medical and surgical care at our Fetal Center.

“Many of these families spent extended periods of time with our Fetal Center staff and in our neonatal intensive care unit,” said Texas Children’s Obstetrician and Gynecologist-in-Chief Dr. Michael Belfort. “This reunion is a memorable opportunity for our team to reconnect with these wonderful families from across the country that we have positively impacted, and we cherish the opportunity to see these patients, who overcame tough challenges in their young lives, grow and thrive.”

Chloe Villarreal, who traveled six hours from her family’s home in San Juan, Texas, joined other patient families to celebrate the lives of these precious miracle babies who were cared for by our maternal fetal medicine and NICU staff, and who have since then, reached incredible milestones along the way.

“We are grateful to Texas Children’s and all of the doctors and the entire medical team who gave us hope and reassurance, and took such great care of our baby,” said Villarreal, whose daughter Charlotte underwent fetoscopic repair surgery to treat spina bifida. “When our daughter turned 18 months old, she walked for the very first time. Texas Children’s will always be a part of our family, and that’s why I make it a point to attend the fetal reunion. It makes me feel so good that all of these children are doing wonderful.”

The Fetal Center Reunion, which occurs every two years at Texas Children’s, included a delicious lunch and plenty of fun activities for the families, including a craft corner where children got a chance to build their own Golden Retriever comfort dog and take their new furry friend home with them.

January 6, 2020

Physicians from across the globe traveled to Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women last week to attend Texas Children’s first Fetal Center Fetoscopic Neural Tube Defect Simulation Course. Teams from Australia, England, Belgium, Turkey, Germany, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, and the USA were here to learn how to perform a specific fetal surgery procedure developed at Texas Children’s.

The two-day program included lectures and hands-on practice sessions with various experts in the field, including Texas Children’s Obstetrician and Gynecologist-in-Chief Dr. Michael Belfort and Pediatric Neurosurgeon Dr. William Whitehead. Whitehead and Belfort pioneered two-port fetoscopic neural tube repair surgery in 2014 when they performed the minimally-invasive procedure in–utero on 23-week-old Grayson Canezero.

Since then, Texas Children’s has become one of the only places in the world where people can go to correct neural tube defects, also known as spina bifida defects, fetoscopically. Advances in fetal surgery and the landmark clinical trial, known as the Management of Myelomeningocele Study (MOMS Trial), have proven that a fetal surgical repair leads to decreased rates of hydrocephalus and improved leg function compared to a postnatal repair.

Through their research and outcomes data, Belfort and his team have shown that performing the surgery fetoscopically yields the same outcome for the baby as the open repair, while being significantly less invasive for the mother. Texas Children’s continues to offer open fetal surgery for spina bifida, the standard of care since 2012, for patients who do not qualify for or opt not to undergo a fetoscopic repair.

Conference attendees learned how to select patients for the surgery, counsel and prepare them for the surgery, perform the surgery, manage patients after the surgery and follow-up after the child is delivered. The conference included several hands-on simulations of the procedure and other related surgeries.

“This is a great way to educate and equip surgeons all over the world with the knowledge and ability to perform a procedure that can make a huge difference in the lives of mothers and their unborn babies,” Belfort said. “I am very pleased we were able to provide this opportunity and I am especially grateful to our wonderful Texas Children’s team members who organized and managed the course and to Karl Storz who provided the equipment that made this possible.”