BREAKING NEWS, Women
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- The woman, who is at least 90, had been sent to hospital in Chile after fall
- X-rays revealed the calcified foetus, which weighed around 4.4lb (2kg)
- The unborn child is a phenomenon known as a ‘lithopedion’, or stone baby
- Only around 300 cases have been reported in medical literature
| By ANNA HODGEKISS for MailOnline |
AN elderly woman in Chile has been found to have a 50-year-old foetus inside her.
The woman, who is at least 90, had been sent to hospital in the city of San Antonio after a fall, the BBC reports.
After carrying out X-rays, doctors were astonished to discover the foetus, which weighed around 4.4lb (2kg).
The unborn child, which had calcified in her body, is a phenomenon known as a ‘lithopedion’, or stone baby.
This is where an unborn child develops outside the womb and becomes calcified.
There are fewer than 300 cases of lithopedions reported in medical literature.
Marco Vargas Lazo, the director of the hospital, called the case ‘extraordinarily rare,’ according to the Efe news agency.
The foetus was ‘large and developed and occupied all of her abdominal cavit’, he said.
However given the woman’s age, doctors ruled it would be too risk to carry out an operation to remove the foetus.
She was therefore sent home without treatment.
The case comes after doctors in Brazil last year discovered a 44-year-old foetus inside the body of an 84-year-old Brazilian woman.
They made the remarkable discovery after the pensioner was admitted to hospital in Natividade, Tocantins state, suffering from severe stomach pains and dizziness.
Medics who X-rayed the senior citizen’s stomach were astonished to see the 20 to 28-week-old ‘stone baby’ inside.
G1 reported that the woman, who has not been named, told doctors there that she became pregnant 44 years ago.
After experiencing excruciating pains she went to a witch doctor as there were no proper doctors in her village at the time.
She claims he prescribed her medication which almost immediately made her feel better.
‘Her stomach didn’t grow any more, the baby stopped moving and she thought it had been aborted,’ Porto Nacional hospital gynaecologist Gesneria Saraiva Kratka told G1.
However, despite the death of the foetus, Saraiva Kratka said it remained inside the woman with her body quickly adapting to coping with carrying it around for more than four decades.
In Columbia in 2013, an 82-year-old, from Bogota, thought to be suffering from a stomach bug, was found to have stone baby.
And in 2009, a 92-year-old Chinese woman was found to have a 60-year-old ‘stone baby’ inside her.
The first reported case of lithopedion was Madame Colombe Chatri, a 68-year-old French woman.
An autopsy after her death in 1582 revealed she had been carrying a fully-developed stone baby in her abdominal cavity for 28 years.
Culled from Daily Mail
— Jun 24, 2015 @ 10:45 GMT
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