DOCTORS at a North-East hospital are helping youngsters fight crippling pain with pioneering treatment to cleanse their bone marrow.

Alice Henry is only the fourth child in the UK to be given the chance of a normal life after a pioneering operation to wash her bone marrow at Newcastle General Hospital.

Alice, 12, has spent most of her life in severe pain with a rare and crippling form of arthritis after she was diagnosed with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) aged just three years old. Since then excruciating pain in her joints, fluid on her lungs and rashes which flare up without warning mean she has rarely been a whole month without needing to stay in hospital.

However, last month Alice became only the fourth child in the UK to undergo a bone marrow cleaning procedure, which doctors at Newcastle General Hospital hope will free her from the genetic condition.

Alice's operation is only the second performed at Newcastle and she still needs weekly check-ups, but Dr Mario Abinun, a consultant in paediatric immunology and infections, says so far all the signs are positive.

In 2000, Dr Abinun and his team first carried out the procedure on Josh Gray, from Darlington, who was then ten years old. Josh recovered well from the operation and his arthritis has not returned.

Alice's mother, Michelle Baldwin, from Burnley, Lancashire, said: "Alice has endured so much. She has spates of illness throughout her life and for three years she was chronically ill.

"When she feels well she is a really positive child, but she has only ever been able to do inactive things and she has not been able to socialise much with other children - this operation is a real chance for her to experience everything she has missed out on - we have pinned all our hopes on it.

"Already Alice has been able to stop taking a lot of the drugs she was on, which is a huge relief because many of them have long-term health risks."

Dr Abinun said: "If the child fails to respond to conventional treatments then we take their own bone marrow, clean it up and remove the cells that are causing the damage, and then give them back their own healthy cells.

"Only this centre and Great Ormond Street, in London, carry out the procedure in this country, as part of a European trial.

"We did the first case here in 2000 and since then there have been two carried out at Great Ormond Street.

"From what we have seen so far, of the 30 children transplanted across Europe, 60 per cent are doing so well they can stop all other treatment, 20 per cent are doing well but not miraculously, while 20 per cent for some reason fail to respond at all."

If Alice's procedure is a success, one of the dramatic results should be that she will start to grow again. Stunted growth is one of the main side-effects of JIA and Alice is only the height of a seven-year-old.

Michelle said: "Alice really wants to grow. That is one of the most important things for her. We sat down and told her all about the operation and she was really keen to try it. Of course we were worried, because it is such a new procedure, but we know that without it she was only going to get worse.

"This treatment has only been invented in her lifetime: when she was diagnosed they told us there was nothing they could do. The doctors and nurses in Newcastle are wonderful, we could not have asked for better."

The procedure is based on the principle that JIA is an immune response where the body's own white cells - the T-cells - start to attack the tissues in the joints.

So doctors remove the patient's bone marrow, filter out the T-cells and then freeze it.

The patient is then given a course of drugs similar to chemotherapy to kill off any T-cells left in their body, before their own bone marrow is transplanted back into them. The hope is that the cleaned-up cells "re-programme" themselves, growing from scratch and developing properly.