This baby had severe mobility issues, doctors couldn't believe what they found inside her brain

This couple's one-year-old baby had severe mobility issues, and an abnormally high cranial volume, so her parents took her to the hospital. The doctors were stunned when they examined her: an unlikely host was living inside her brain. The little girl underwent emergency surgery.

Parasitic binoculars

The scientific journal Neurology shared this clinical case. Chinese doctors based in Shanghai made an astonishing discovery inside the brain of a 1-year-old baby. Suffering from severe motor disorders, they realized that the little girl was harboring a foetus in her skull.

This rare condition, which looks like something out of a sci-fi movie, is called 'foetus in foetu' or sometimes the parasitic twin phenomenon. It is an anomaly that affects the development of an embryo in a monozygotic twin pregnancy, i.e. in identical twins. It generally appears in the first trimester.

A case of fetus in fetu was observed in a one-year-old girl with motor retardation and an exaggeratedly large cranial circumference.

Rare condition

Although doctors know how to explain this disorder, they don't yet know why it occurs. Parasitic twin syndrome occurs when, after fertilization, the cells do not divide properly. As a result, one of the two embryos becomes trapped inside the other. Although not quite dead, its development stops.

The foetus found in the one-year-old girl's brain had a spine and upper and lower limbs that were in the process of being formed. Although extremely rare, this case is not unique either. Around 1 in 500,000 pregnancies worldwide are affected by this malformation. Nevertheless, most of the time, the parasitic twin is more likely to be found in the womb of the full-term twin, rather than in its brain.

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This article has been translated from Gentside FR.

Sources used:

LiveScience: In extremely rare case, doctors remove fetus from brain of 1-year-old