He could not believe his eyes. Dr. Michael Narvey, Canadian pediatrician, discovered, at the same time as a 33-year-old woman, that she was pregnant and that the fetus had lodged in her liver.
- In France, 16,000 cases of ectopic pregnancies are recorded each year.
- Between 1967 and 2017, 21 cases of intrahepatic pregnancies, i.e. in the case where the fetus develops in the liver, have been reported.
- When the fetus is not lodged in the uterine cavity, the pregnancy should be terminated and the poorly implanted egg removed as this can cause internal bleeding.
We speak of an ectopic pregnancy when the fertilized egg is not fixed in the uterine cavity. In this case, the latter can be implanted in a fallopian tube, more rarely on an ovary or in the abdominal cavity. The embryo can also lodge in other unexpected body areas. For proof: a Canadian recently learned that a fetus was in her liver, according to the British daily The Independent.
This rare case of ectopic pregnancy was reported by Dr. Michael Narvey, a Canadian pediatrician who was in charge of the case. “I thought I had seen it all!”, he said in a video posted to his TikTok account last week. According to the practitioner, a 33-year-old woman visited the Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Manitoba, Canada because she had been experiencing menstrual bleeding for 14 consecutive days. “She had had her period 49 days before,” he added. The health professionals decided to do an ultrasound.
21 cases of intrahepatic pregnancies in 50 years
During this examination, they discovered that the patient was pregnant and had a fetus, showing signs of vitality, nestled in her liver. “We sometimes see it in the abdomen, but never in the liver. This is a first for me”, he confessed. But according to Dr. Karan Raj, another doctor widely followed on TikTok, this is not the first fetus to develop in the liver.
In a video shared on the platform, he relayed a case similar to that of the 33-year-old Canadian. “One of the scariest scans I have ever seen was of a 27-year-old woman, who had a healthy fetus in her right lobe of the liver.” According to an article from the blog Réalités biomédicales du World21 cases of intrahepatic pregnancies were identified between 1967 and 2017 in the English medical literature. “Only 29% of these pregnancies progressed beyond the first trimester,” has indicated The world.
A risk of internal bleeding
Asked by The Independentthe Mayo Clinic, an American hospital-university and research federation, explained that this type of pregnancy could not proceed normally. “The fertilized egg cannot survive, and the tissue that develops can cause life-threatening internal bleeding, if left untreated”, she developed. Same story on the side of Dr. Karan Raj: “The liver is a highly vascular structure, so any compressive force against it can cause massive internal bleeding.”
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