By Joe Carlson
Not long ago, 9-year-old Javier Hruza would have had to face the risks of surgery half a dozen times to adjust the implanted metal rods straightening out his severely curved spine.
But the Shoreview boy had growing-spine rods implanted in January. The procedure allows him to take advantage of a new technology approved by the Food and Drug Administration last September called the MAGEC Spinal Bracing System to treat severe early onset scoliosis. 
The device lets doctors adjust the rods in an office visit, using magnets rather than surgical tools.
“It lasted 45 seconds. I said, ‘That’s it?’ I thought he was just warming it up or something,” Javier’s mother, Elee Hruza, said after Dr. Tenner Guillaume pressed a remote control the size of a power tool against her son’s back to advance the magnetically driven mechanism in the growing rods. “I wasn’t sure whether it would be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t appear to be at all.”
Guillaume is one of the pediatric spine surgeons at Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare in St. Paul who recently began implanting the magnetically controlled growing rods in kids’ backs. They are used instead of the traditional rods that require surgery every six months for three years to adjust their length.
“With traditional growing rods, we usually tell families when we initiate that treatment that there is about a 100 percent risk of a complication during their treatment at some point,” Guillaume said. “The hope is that we can get rid of a lot of things like wound infection that are associated with those return trips to the operating room.”