Thai toddler becomes the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen

Matheryn Noavaratpong died in January 2015 after her family made the painful decision to take her off life support.

She suffered from ependymoblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer that occurs in very young children.

In an e-mail interview with online magazine Motherboard, Matheryn's father, Dr Sahatorn Noavaratpong, said that they decided to cryogenically freeze Matheryn becasue they hope that one day science can come up with a better way of treating this form of cancer and also regrow her body. 

Matheryn was diagnosed in 2014 when she was just 26 months old. 

 

 

In the hospital, the doctors found a tumour that was 11cm long in the left half of her brain.

They removed half the tumour in an operation which involved drilling through Matheryn's skull.

The little girl defied the odds and woke up from her coma. 

What followed was months of operations and treatments which left her with radiation burns and caused her to lose 80 per cent of the left side of her brain.

 

 

Despite her fight, the cancer spread to the rest of her brain.

So on Jan 8 this year, her family took her out of hospital and made the painful decision of releasing her from her life support.

“Among family and relatives, we played and held her before we relieved her from the life support system, released her heavy load off her shoulder at 18:18," said Dr Noavaratpong.

Before they made that decision, they got in touch with Alcor Life Extension, a company in the United States dealing in cryonics - the low temperature preservation of humans and animals - and preparations were made to preserve her body.

"They're hoping that by preserving the tissue cells of this particular cancer, they can come up with a better treatment plan, and maybe even eventually cure it. If you look at the global picture of what they're trying to accomplish, it's very altruistic," Aaron Drake, the Medical Response Director at ​the Alcor Life Extension Foundation to Motherboard.

Now, young Matheryn is the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen, and her body lies in Arizona, in the hope that in the near future, science can not only find a new method of fighting her cancer but also revive her from her deep sleep.

Source: Facebook, Motherboard