Friday, 28 Nov, 2008 Health & Fitness

Doctors in Saudi Arabia have registered a truly phenomenal case. A 1-year-old girl had proved to be pregnant. Doctors that have been occupied with this case affirm that they haven't heard of such cases to happen anywhere in the world. The Arabian Mass-Media has already turned on the discussion about the possibility of drawing out the unborn twin from the little girl's body to be a crime.

As it turned out, the girl's mother during her pregnancy has had 2 embryos and one of them began to grow in the uterus of the second baby. Although considered phenomenal, such cases were previously knon.

The Indian town Nagpur is famous for its 36-years-old farmer, from whose body the doctors have drawn out the embryo of his brother-twin. It is curious the fact that the man has come to see the doctors only when his belly had turned so big that he couldn't breathe. When he was brought to the hospital, he was urgently sent to surgery. The surgeons were sure that the patient had a huge tumor, which was pressing on his diaphragm. During the surgery, the doctor has pulled out from the man's abdominal cavity a strange half-formed being.

India, 2002 - doctors took out an embryo out of the body of a 6-months-old boy. "We couldn't believe that we had taken out a dead embryo with a weight of 1 kg from the body of a child, whose weight was 6.5 kg. It's a very rare case," says Pradip Kumar Mukherdgey, the leading doctor of that group.

2 years before that, doctors from another hospital of Calcutta had drawn out a foetus of 230g from the body of a 40-days new born.

Such abnormality is called "fetus in fetu". Specialists say that these cases are extremely rare in the medical practice. An embryo appears in another embryo in one out of half-million pregnancies. This phenomenon takes place on an early stage of the pregnancy and, as a rule, both embryos die in the mother's uterus.

It also happens that the delivery is successfull, but the embryo "caught in the trap" continues on living as a parasite, connected to his elder brother with a sort of umbilical cord. For a certain period of time, the second embryo continues growing up equally with the other one, still remaining inside it, and when the process stops, the undeveloped foetus turns into a parasitical body.

A foetus in a foetus is considered to be alive when the tissues of his organism are not dead or have not been removed yet. The embryo's cells must have a normal metabolism in order to be capable of living. From the point of view of physical development, even if the organs of the "fetus in fetu" receive a normal blood supply from the "master", still, in all of the cases known, the parasitical embryo had a set of critical defects. As a rule, his brain, heart, lungs, gastro-intestinal tract do not function properly. Thus, the foetus in a foetus has no chances to survive beneath the limits of the brother's body. Besides, its existence is a real threat for the normal twin brother.

Posted by summer_rain