An ultrasound scan on a 35-week-old fetus found an anomaly that doctors thoughts was a liver cyst. More study showed that the space actually contained a tiny, second fetus, a twin that had been engulfed by her larger sister, and was feeding from her abdomen by an umbilical cord. This is a rare condition called “fetus-in-fetu.”
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Embryos start off as flat discs, which, at around the fourth week of gestation, fold in various directions to form “shapes that can eventually form body structures and organs,” explains Rachel Feltman of Popular Science. Because identical twin embryos grow in close proximity, very rarely one can get folded into the other during this biological process; according to New Scientist’s Alice Klein, this may be more likely to happen if the absorbed twin has an existing defect.
There have been cases of fetus-in-fetu not discovered until adulthood, but those were cases in which the parasitic fetus stopped growing. For the Colombian baby, doctors decided to perform a C-section at 37 weeks, because they were afraid the second fetus would continue growing and crush the larger baby’s internal organs. Read about the case at Smithsonian.
(Unrelated image credit: Andrés Nieto Porras)
Source: neatorama