[40-year-old Mummified Fetus] Found In Colombian Woman's Belly

2023 Author: Abraham Higgins | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-27 23:16

[40-year-old mummified fetus] found in Colombian woman's belly

Doctors found in the abdomen of an 82-year-old Colombian woman who was admitted to hospital with complaints of abdominal pain, a mummified fetus that had been there for at least 40 years. This extremely rare phenomenon is called lithopedion and occurs as a result of fetal death during an ectopic pregnancy.

X-ray showing the position of the lithopedion in the abdominal cavity of an elderly woman. Image from the site ntd.tv /

Doctors found in the abdomen of an 82-year-old Colombian woman a mummified fetus that had been there for at least 40 years, NTD TV reports, citing local media.

On December 8, an elderly woman was admitted to Tunjuelito Hospital in the capital Bogota with diarrhea and complaints of abdominal pain. At first, the doctor who examined the old woman suspected she had an attack of gastroenteritis, but then he felt some kind of tumor in her abdominal cavity. The X-ray showed that there was a calcified fetus in the woman's peritoneum. Doctors assume that the patient has lived with a petrified fetus in the abdominal cavity for at least 40 years. She was referred to another hospital for an operation to remove the fetus.

This extremely rare phenomenon is called lithopedion and occurs as a result of fetal death during an ectopic pregnancy. If the fetus that has developed in the abdominal cavity is too large to be absorbed by the mother's body, protective mechanisms are activated, as a result of which the fetus undergoes external calcification, which prevents infection of the mother's body.

An ectopic pregnancy with the localization of the ovum in the abdominal cavity is one of the rarest types of ectopic pregnancies and occurs in about 0.1 percent of cases. Moreover, only about one and a half percent of abdominal pregnancy ends with the development of lithopedion. Over the past 400 years, about 300 cases of lithopedion have been mentioned in the medical literature. Moreover, as a rule, the mummified fetus remains undetected in the mother's body for decades. So, in February 2012, a 35-year-old petrified fetus was removed from the body of a 70-year-old Indian woman.