MOSCOW, December 18 (RIA Novosti) – A 5-year-old Russian girl underwent brain surgery to remove a tumor that caused her to have fits of involuntary laughter and blackouts during which she would cease breathing, a hospital said Wednesday.
The girl, identified as Lena P., first started having convulsive laughing fits when she was eight months old, and after two years she was suffering 10 blackouts a day, her mother said in the hospital’s statement.
The girl was initially misdiagnosed as an epileptic, but a specialist later determined that she had a non-cancerous tumor in her hypothalamus, a part of the brain that regulates involuntary functions.
Lena was released from the hospital, in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, on Tuesday, the statement said.
It noted, however, that she suffered one convulsion since undergoing the complicated operation, which involved millimeter-wide incisions near her brain stem.
The operation took place at the Meshalkin Novosibirsk Research Institute of Circulation Pathology.
