Word: atresia
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...liver adjusts to its new metabolic work load. William Lewis, born last Oct. 10 in New York City, was a rare example of a far more serious condition. His complexion remained abnormal. Even more frightening, his stools and urine indicated that he suffered from an inborn defect, biliary atresia-the absence or severe underdevelopment of tiny bile ducts emerging from the liver. William's case proved to be unusual in another respect: he was flown to Japan in the search for lifesaving corrective surgery...
Nature designed the ducts to carry bile on its way from the liver, where it is made, to the duodenum, where it aids in digestion. Among the estimated 200 occurrences each year of biliary atresia in the U.S., there are a few in which ducts outside the liver are large enough for corrective surgery. But not in William's case...
...most common causes of irreparable, irreversible liver damage is a congenital abnormality of the bile ducts called biliary atresia, which behaves like a malignancy and usually proves fatal within 18 months of birth. The other cause is cancer itself, which may strike...
...team was just beginning. In wintry Brooklyn, Dr. Kantrowitz had put his team on full alert at about the same time as Dr. Barnard was alerting his. His 19-day-old patient, the intended heart-transplant recipient, had been born blue. The child was a victim of severe tricuspid atresia-constriction, to the point of almost total closure, of the three-leafed valve that normally regulates the flow of blood from the right auricle to the right ventricle on its way to the lungs for oxygenation. There is no way to correct this condition surgically, and its victims live...
...three other girls had no cancer, but biliary atresia-a congenital absence of bile ducts. This behaves for all practical purposes like a malignancy, and usually proves fatal within 18 months. Since construction of a normal route for the bile was impossible in these cases, the Starzl team did transplants for Paula Kay Hansen, aged 2, of Fort Worth; Kerri Lynn Brown, 16 months, of Long Beach, Calif.; and Carol Lynne Macourt, 16 months, of Salt Lake City...