Your Health: Brittle bone treatment for children

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) - Thousands of children have bones so weak that the slightest tumble or fall can break them.

Unicameral bone cysts are noncancerous bone tumors. It’s unknown why they form and the surgery to get rid of them can be painful - until now.

Life is pretty sweet for 12-year-old Brookyln Tissiere, but it hasn’t always been that way.

“I was skipping on my kitchen floor with socks, and I fell,” Brooklyn said.

It was the first time she broke her arm. In all, her bone snapped five times.

“She actually just stepped off a low diving board to our local pool,” recalled her dad, Mark Tissiere. “And when she pushed herself up, her arm broke.”

She had an unicameral bone cyst.

“It’s a fluid-filled cyst that expands bone,” said Dr. Shanker Rajeswaran. “It makes the bone thinner and so, then, the walls essentially become as thin as an eggshell.”

Doctors performed a more invasive surgery on Brooklyn six years ago, making a large incision, scraping the cyst wall and grafting it up with bone, but the cyst came back.

Brooklyn became the first person to undergo a new minimally invasive technique developed at Lurie Children’s Hospital. Doctors inject the cyst with doxycycline to destroy it and then inject a bone graft to strengthen the bone.

Brooklyn hasn’t had any breaks in the last four years.

“I’ve started playing volleyball,” she said. “I played softball, dance, basketball.”

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