A 22-year-old woman from Tiruchi was treated for a rare condition that left her in severe pain while walking.
Iswarya Mohan had been suffering from osteoid osteoma (multiple tumours in her right heel bone) for a decade. She had undergone two surgeries but found no relief.
Iswarya Mohan approached orthopaedic surgeon N. Mayil Vahanan Natarajan in Chennai in July, who referred her to Dr. Navin Gnanasekaran of Westminster Hospital. He said only 13 or 14 cases of multifocal osteoid osteoma had been reported in the world since 1928.
Dr. Navin said although she had taken several scans in various places doctors had missed the five tumours in the calcaneum (heel bone). “The patient did not want another surgery. A 3T MRI scan revealed multiple tumours. We decided to do radio frequency ablation for the most vascular lesions by making two small incisions in the skin.”
“In a three-hour procedure, the benign vascular tumours were removed through radio frequency waves. There were no complications and after an hour of the procedure she was discharged,” he said.
On why the doctors chose to remove only two tumours, N. Arunkumar, who assisted Dr. Navin said removing all tumours could weaken the bone and make it brittle. Since the most vascular lesions were chosen and the procedure was done under general anaesthesia as it was relatively painful. After the procedure, the patient did not feel any pain so they decided not to do further RF.
If the tumour recurred and if the patient felt pain again then a similar procedure would be done, the doctors said.
Dr. Mayil Vahanan said the incidence of bone tumours was 1% in the population. “An orthopaedist will see only one malignant bone tumour in a year,” he said.
The cost of the procedure ranges from ₹15,000 to ₹3 lakh depending on the number of sittings. The doctors plan to publish their work as a research paper in a peer-reviewed journal.