Doctors in China find a living fetus inside a little girl’s skull

• A living fetus was found inside a one-year-old girl’s skull.
• It was a twin that hadn’t fully formed.
• The girl was having cognitive issues.

A one-year-old girl in China suffered a terrible ordeal. She was having trouble walking, issues with her motor skills and she wasn’t growing at the normal rate of children her age. In addition, her head was very large and continuing to grow, so her parents took her to the hospital, never imagining what they would find.

Given the unusual case, the doctors made the decision to investigate further by taking an X-ray of her skull, which showed bones in a sac inside her brain. It was a living fetus — a twin brother who never fully formed.

Living fetus found in girl’s head

The bizarre case was published in the scientific journal Neurology in December. Experts explained that it is called «fetus in fetu».

This is a rare condition, also known as a «parasitic twin,» Dr. Marlon Marrufo told MundoNow. This occurs when twins «come together in the womb and only one of them continues its normal development, while the unborn twin is normally absorbed by the body of the developing twin.” He clarified that it is extremely rare for them to be located in the head.

Doctors said it was urgent to remove the fetus from the girl’s head

Specialists indicated that the parasitic twin urgently needed to be removed. They discovered that the fetus was about 10 centimeters long with early stages of arm and hand formations. In addition, he already had a vertebral column, femur, and spina bifida.

When they ran DNA tests on the tumor, they confirmed that it was the little girl’s twin who had been absorbed during a developmental process called neural plate folding, a necessary step for the structure of the brain and spinal cord. This would explain how the parasitic fetus ended up inside his sister’s skull.

A similar case occurred in 1982

A similar case occurred in 1982 when a six-week-old boy had an abnormal growth on his head, much like the one-year-old girl in China. When they opened up the boy’s skull, they found a 14-centimeter-long fetus inside with limbs, a torso, a head, and other recognizable features. The parasitic fetus was removed and the living twin was able to recover. The doctors in the case of the girl from China have not made any statements about how she is doing now.

“These are extremely rare cases, however we can find one in every five hundred thousand live births. The cause is attributed to a cluster of cells created in an accident at the point of formation of the zygote egg before the formation of the embryo,” explained Dr. Marrufo.