A baby was born with no eyes due to a rare condition that is only known to affect 30 people in the world.
Wrenley Ice was born on 6 November last year in Missouri and her parents quickly realised something wasn’t quite right when she didn’t open her eyes.
Her mum Taylor had struggled with fertility for over a year before she became pregnant with her daughter.
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The parents say that through the whole pregnancy they were told by doctors their baby was perfectly healthy.
Yet, Taylor told local news station KFVS 12 that she noticed she ‘wasn’t opening her eyes’ when she was born and immediately asked the nurse.
“She told me ‘well, in the womb, it’s dark, so they don’t normally open their eyes right away’.”
But the little girl’s eyes never opened. Taylor recalled: “The paediatrician’s going over the baby, and he just stops with his examination and looks up at us and says, 'Your daughter doesn’t have any eyes.’
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“I just looked at him and said, ‘Do you mean they’re small?’ He goes, ‘No, they aren’t there.’
“I just burst into tears because I just couldn’t fully process what that meant at the time.”
Nine days after the family drove 150 miles to St Louis Children’s Hospital (on the same day Taylor had just given birth via C-section), doctors determined that the little girl was born with anophthalmia – the name for the condition when a baby is born without one or both of their eyes.
An extremely rare condition, doctors don’t widely know what causes it.
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According to the National Eye Institute, it can be caused by changes in genes, taking certain medicines during pregnancy and coming into contact with harmful things in the environment.
Doctors found that Wrenley doesn’t produce cortisol (a stress hormone produced by the adrenal glands).
Genetic testing showed that she had a condition known as hyploinsufficiency of the PRR-12 gene and this therefore led to her eyes not developing while in the womb.
Taylor said: “I couldn't believe that something like that happened to us.”
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Dr Nate Jensen, a geneticist at St Louis Children's Hospital, told KFVS 12: “This is an incredibly rare condition."
He said although Taylor’s pregnancy was normal, the parents could have passed on gene mutations without releasing, and there’s a 50 percent chance Wrenley could pass it on to her future kids.
“There’s nothing Wrenley’s mother or father did to cause this,” Dr Jensen said. “There’s nothing either could’ve done to prevent it - it’s totally random.”
No treatment can give the little girl working eyes, but the doctors look to give her prosthetics so she can live a more normal life.
Topics: US News, World News, Health, Parenting
Jess Battison