Doctors, in a very rare circumstance, remove the fetus from a 1-year-old's brain
Doctors surgically removed a fetus from a 1-year-old child's brain in a very uncommon situation. The child's delayed motor skill development, larger head circumference, and fluid buildup in the brain led doctors to believe that the fetus was within the mother.
According to the report, which was released on December 12, 2022, in the journal Neurology (opens in new tab), the young child's head mass was a "malformed monochorionic diamniotic twin," meaning that while the fetuses once shared a placenta, they had separate amniotic sacs—the sacs with thin walls that contain liquid—during their development in the womb. These twins are identical since they were created from the same fertilized egg.
The condition known as "fetus in fetus" or, occasionally, "parasitic twin" occurs when one fetus becomes engulfed by another. According to the Miami Herald, the absorbed twin often stops growing while the other does (opens in a new tab).
Over 20 occurrences of intracranial fetal bleeding in a fetus have been published worldwide, according to a 2020 case report in the journal World Neurosurgery (opens in a new tab).
Brain scans of the 1-year-old's revealed that the fetus had spina bifida, a condition in which part of the spinal cord is exposed rather than covered by tissues of the back due to an issue during development. The fetus also contained a vertebral column and two leg bones (the femur and tibia). It was discovered that the fetal tumor had "upper limb and finger-like buds" after it was removed.
Only 1 in 500,000 live births is thought to experience this phenomenon; typically, the deformed fetus manifests as a mass in the other fetus's abdomen, stuck behind the tissues that line the abdominal wall. Yet in this instance, a mass developed in the head of the "host" fetus and most likely materialized very, very early in the course of development, at the point when the fertilized egg forms a mass of cells known as a blastocyst.
The case report's authors hypothesized that the intracranial fetus-in-fetus developed from "unseparated blastocysts," which means the cell clusters that were supposed to develop into two distinct fetuses remained together. "The conjoined pieces envelope the other embryo during neural plate folding and grow into the forebrain of the host baby." (The neural plate is a developing structure that gives origin to the nervous system.)
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| Doctors, in a very rare circumstance, remove the fetus from a 1-year-old's brain |
There are no specifics on the 1-year-post-surgery child's status in the brief case report.
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