Portuguese doctors perform rare surgery to help 5-year-old open his mouth

Portuguese doctors have done what counterparts in France said couldn’t be done for another 10 years. Yet the operation was so necessary. Little Enzo, a Portuguese child living with his parents in Paris, could not open his mouth. He couldn’t eat, had serious respiratory problems. In short he was living a half-life and developing much too slowly. But thanks to doctors in Vila Nova de Gaia he has been given a much brighter future. The team carried out a complex surgery involving cutting into his jaw bone and inserting screws that became activated every day to gently widen the bone by millimeters. Enzo’s condition is Pierre Robin syndrome which developed after an infection when he was a baby. He is now well on the road to recovery, starting to eat again, and even talking.