Dwarf Teen-Ager Has Surgery to Lengthen Legs

A sixth-grader suffering from dwarfism will be able to walk and ride a bicycle like other children after operations to lengthen his legs by eight inches, hospital officials said Wednesday.

The first stage of lengthening the legs of 13-year-old Juan Garcia “went extremely well,” said Dr. Chad Price, a pediatric-orthopedic surgeon at Orlando Regional Medical Center.

Price and the Italian surgeon who perfected the technique, Dr. Renzi Brivio, operated on the teen-ager’s left leg, cutting bones above and below the knee and placing adjustable metal clamps on the incisions, on the outside of the leg.

The clamps have three-inch screws that go into the bones. Each week, the screws will be turned, causing the bones to separate about one-half inch.

The screw-turning “is not painful at all since it goes into the bone. The surgeons have a lot of previous experience to base this on,” hospital spokeswoman Martha Workman said.

Natural healing over the bones will produce a callous surface that causes the leg to lengthen as it forms, Price said.

Garcia will be on crutches but not hospitalized for eight months, the doctors said. His other leg will then be cut and clamped in the same fashion.

The operation, pioneered at the University of Verona, Italy, has been carried out on a few normal-sized American adults, but never on a dwarf in this country, Price said.

Garcia is 3 feet, 10 inches tall, almost a foot shorter than his fellow students at Teague Middle School in Altamonte Springs.

His mother, Carmen, said she was “so happy, I could cry, I could jump. . . . It’s so wonderful.”