Marissa's Story
Marissa Cooper was in severe respiratory distress when she arrived at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital on January 21, 2005. Born just 37 days earlier, she'd been home just a short time after spending her first weeks of life under watchful eyes in neonatal intensive care.
Responding to the loud beep of Marissa's apnea monitor the night before, Jaymie Cooper ran to the crib and found her daughter turning blue from lack of oxygen. The Coopers rushed the infant to an emergency room in Beaumont where she was quickly transferred to Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital.
Marissa and her twin sister, Morgan, were born several weeks prematurely and experienced twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. They shared a placenta and a split umbilical cord, through which Marissa received less nutrition than Morgan. Thanks to good prenatal care, the girls weighed about 4.5 pounds each when they were born and originally stayed in the hospital less than a month. At Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital, doctors diagnosed Marissa with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a common virus affecting infants and young children. "It developed into pneumonia and went down from there," Mrs. Cooper lamented.
Each year about 125,000 children are hospitalized in the United States with RSV infections. Until 10 years ago, an estimated 5,000 American children died annually from RSV, but thanks to improved intensive care practices, that number has dropped to 500, said Dr. Giuseppe Colasurdo, physician-in-chief at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital and chairman of pediatrics at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.
A team of doctors and neonatal intensive care nurses at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital used two innovative treatments to save Marissa's life. The first was extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, ECMO, a heart-lung bypass technique that removes blood from the body, oxygenates it, and pumps it back in, giving the lungs a rest so they can heal.
"Our patients typically remain on ECMO for five to seven days," says Amir Khan, MD, a neonatologist at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital and The University of Texas Medical School at Houston. But Marissa's lungs were not functioning after the normal course of treatment, and she remained on ECMO for several weeks.
The doctors had three choices with Marissa. They could stop life support, continue ECMO and hope for the best, or try a new approach of their own. Marissa's parents and the doctors chose the third option.
Cells in the lungs manufacture surfactant proteins which, among other things, keep the lungs from collapsing. RSV attacks these cells and turns off the genes that tell them to produce these proteins, Dr. Colasurdo explains. He and his team had been researching surfactant proteins and felt they might help Marissa's lungs repair themselves. "It's an expanding area of investigation but an unexplored territory in clinical practice," said Dr. Colasurdo.
The doctors provided medication containing surfactant proteins in an attempt to reopen the lungs and boost the immune system against the virus. They injected the proteins into the child's lungs while she was on ECMO.
Marissa improved after the first two injections, but the effect faded. In a last-ditch attempt to save her, Dr. Colasurdo and the ECMO team tried one more pair of treatments. This time, the team saw lasting results.
Gradually, and with many stops, starts and setbacks, Marissa got better. All told, she spent 34 days on ECMO and about five months in the hospital.
Today, Marissa gets a monthly dose of a synthetic antibody that helps lessen the effects of RSV.
"It was touch and go for a while and we're not done yet," her mother says, "but she's doing great."
Her doctors agree. "We expect her to do quite well," Colasurdo says. "Developmentally, she looks terrific."
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6431 Fannin Street
MSB 3.020
Houston, Texas 77030
713-500-5757 (Voice)
Other Locations
Other locations of the Department of Pediatrics include the following:
Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital
