A young Indian woman carried her twin sister’s fetus in her womb for 17 years. An extremely rare case of “fetus in fetus”.
She was “pregnant” from birth! A 17-year-old young woman living in Patna in India has just been operated on for an extremely rare condition: she carried in her abdomen a “parasite” twin sister, a fetus without a nervous system but with hair, teeth and limbs.
A second embryo or tumor
Such cases, called “fetus in fetus” are extremely rare, 1 in 500,000, and this is the eighth time that one has been observed in an adult woman. Some believe that this anomaly occurs when, in the presence of two embryos, one is enveloped by the other from the beginning of pregnancy. This fetus which develops neither brain nor nervous system feeds on its “twin”. According to another theory, this second “fetus” is actually a complex form of tumor called a teranoma and can develop different types of tissue at the same time, including hair and teeth.
The ordeal of the young woman, reported by the BMJ, had started 5 years ago when she noticed the presence of a hard lump in her abdomen. The lump grew gradually, causing periodic pain and accompanied by a feeling of its satiety, the mass beginning to exert strong pressure on the internal organs.
Vertebrae, ribs and long bones
During an initial examination, the lump was identified as a tumour. But during further investigation using a CT scan, doctors identified calcium deposits “whose shape resembled vertebrae, ribs and long bones”. This led them to make the diagnosis of “fetus in fetus” and to perform surgery to extract it from the patient’s body.
“I feel very good, my abdomen has become flat again and my parents are very happy!”, declared the young woman just after this intervention. She will nevertheless have to be regularly monitored, as some of the cells of her “twin” still present in her body may, according to doctors, behave like cancer and become uncontrollable.
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