Chandigarh: Born three months premature and weighing just 450 grams, an infant girl has survived and has been discharged from a private hospital in Mohali near here, said doctors.
Doctors who treated the infant claim that the girl could be the country`s smallest baby to survive this medical condition.
Discharged from the hospital over three months after she was born April 21 this year, the infant now weighs 1.4 kg, neonatology consultant Sunil K Aggarwal told media here Thursday.
He said that the infant was kept under close observation and treatment round-the-clock at the neo-natal intensive care unit (NICU) at the hospital during these three months.
For the infant`s mother, Rajni, seeing her little one survive despite her medical condition was the "greatest gift from God".
Rajni had earlier experienced three failed pregnancies - all in the seventh month of pregnancy.
Aggarwal said that most newborn specialists consider that babies weighing less than 500 grams have a bleak chance of survival.
"In the first week, none of us thought the baby was going to make it. She is a little miracle," he said.
"It`s too early to know how she will fare when she grows up. Since she did not have any major complications, we are hopeful of normal development," he said.
Aggarwal said: "There is no reported survival of a baby of this weight in India. The earlier record, based on the various reports published in this regard, was of a baby weighing 495 grams from Pune in October 2010."
The infant needed ventilation support for 15 days before she could breathe on her own, he said.
"Thereafter, we had to put her on artificial oxygen for another 12 days, apart from providing intravenous nutrition for the first two weeks till she became stable," he added.
IANS
