The first steps of Valentina Rocatti, the girl who suffers from a serious illness and has received expensive treatment

Valentina Rocatti, the two-year-old girl who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), started a new treatment in the country 45 days ago with an expensive drug and in the last few hours the drug has started to bear fruit : Valen started to take his first steps.

The parents of the little girl, born in Rosario, enthusiastically told that their daughter he started to walk little by little and they said with emotion that the medicine work and you begin to see the development of a disease that threatened to leave her prostrate and put his life in danger.

“Yesterday while playing with her I stopped her and saw that he started to move his legs like to move forward. I called her and touched her legs so she could come with me. He took two or three small steps. We filmed it and exploded with joy because it is something that we dream of since we were given this diagnosis: that he can take his first steps, “said Fabián Rocatti, his father. Bugle.

At the time, they were all at home. Fabian called Gisela, his wife, who was in the kitchen. Lucia, his little sister, also witnessed the expected moment.

“I don’t know if he realizes why he was looking at the little pictures. When I said ‘very good’ he laughed, sort of mischievously. He realized he was doing something weird, which I hadn’t done before, ”her father said happily.

“Progressing day by day,” posted the @zolgensmaparavalen account on Tuesday where we see Valen standing making two small (but giant) steps forward and then throwing himself happily into his daddy’s arms.

Valen maintains good general condition without respiratory or digestive problems. He continues, as since the family learned of his diagnosis, a routine of working with a kinesiologist three times a week.

Monday, he took his first steps. The recommendation of the doctors is not to rush the process. Expect to strengthen your muscles with “painstaking work”, as defined by their parents. “We were dying to continue, but we let her rest,” says Fabián.

Since applying the drug, which strengthens her muscles, the kinesiologist has seen her become firmer in the hips and with more strength in the trunk.

Faced with this prognosis, each time they let her stand longer: from the first ten seconds, they went to twenty, thirty and forty. Always supported by something. Until Monday, he surprised with the first steps.

The Rosatti fought for speed up bureaucracy and accelerate access to this drug, developed by the laboratory Novartis, whose price in the United States is 2.1 million dollars.

It is an innovative drug: gene therapy, the first approved in the country, in which the patient receives a missing or damaged gene that prevents the production of a key protein in the motor neuron communication.

Failures in this process lead to the serious consequences of SMA, a neurodegenerative disease that manifests in infants and children at a very young age and statistically leads to death before the age of two in 50% of those affected.

Among other symptoms, can’t stand, have difficulty swallowing, crawling, and breathe.

“There are not many projections because it is a relatively new drug. In every organism this disease, which has several types, affects a lot of things. But it is a daily work and fortunately the results are showing. are already being felt, “he explained. father, who still could not recover from the joy that Valen’s first steps caused him.

LM