 |
| An X-ray showing the stomach of a newborn baby girl who was found to have an embryo inside her, July 2021. (Assuta Medical Center) |
It is not the first reported case, but it is so rare that even doctors at the Assuta Medical Center in Ashdod, Israel, were alarmed.
According to a report by The Times of Israel, a baby girl who was born with an unusually enlarged stomach, was after some checks, found to have a medical condition known as "fetus in fetu", a phenomenon where a child is born with an embryo (a developing baby), in the child's stomach.
This condition according to medical experts, usually happens among twins, where one ends up absorbing the other during prenatal development.
“We were surprised to discover that it was an embryo,” Omer Globus, head of neonatology at the Assuta Medical Center where the baby was born, told The Times of Israel.
“We think that there was more than one there, and we are still checking that,” he added, after explaining that a team of doctors ended up removing two different blobs of tissue from the baby’s stomach.
The partially developed embryo contained some organs including bones and a heart, prompting the doctors to stress to The Times that no sibling brutality had occurred — the embryo was far from fully developed and was never alive in any conventional meaning of the word.
“It did not look like an embryo as you imagine it,” Globus said.
The operation was successful and the girl is expected to make a full recovery, Globus said. Both the girl and her mother, who has three other children, have already been sent home.
Globus said there are a number of theories as to how such cases occur, with one being that the pregnancy starts off as twins but then one of the embryos is absorbed by the other.
“It happens as part of the fetal development process when there are cavities that close during development and one of the embryos enters such a space,” he said. “The fetus inside partially develops but does not live and remains there.”
Live Science reports that fetus in fetu births are a rare form of parasitism between developing twins. That’s where an identical twin inadvertently absorbs the other before either is finished developing — though in this case the absorbed twin is partially preserved. Others suspect that the internal embryo is actually a kind of prenatal tumor that happens to contain the same kinds of cells as a developing human embryo.