“It really is a potential game changer for people with this disease,” he said."They can't find help, and they're dying and they're suffering and they're in pain, and nobody seems to know what to do, and that's the problem when you have a rare disease."
She began to review surgery options, including a duodenojejunostomy, which connects two parts of the intestines. That procedure, the current standard for SMAS, has a 67% failure rate. He didn’t realize until two years later, when one of his residents was working on a senior project on the case, that he was the first to have ever done the procedure to treat SMAS. It was an emergency surgery with no time to prepare, so his mind saw the duodenoduodenostomy as the only definitive answer to the puzzle in front of him. He assumed other surgeons had already been performing it this way.
Her surgery was scheduled for August, so she made the trip to Ocala and was back to eating in no time. All 12 patients who have undergone the surgery have had the same results. They’ve come from around the country, and future patients are already scheduled from Dubai and Toronto. Rohrbach had had numerous tests for gallbladder problems and appendicitis that would always come back negative or inconclusive before realizing it was SMAS.