Teratomas and fetus-in-fetu
These are the freakiest things ever! Imagine a bundle of teeth and hair coming out of your body.
Imagine it crying 'mommy! mommy!'
Haha.. Ok.. maybe that will never happen. But scary nonetheless.
May humans never be cloned. Amen.
And next: something I find most amazing! Fetus-in-fetu.
Aug. 23, 2006 — Sanju Bhagat's stomach was once so swollen he looked nine months pregnant and could barely breathe.
Living in the city of Nagpur, India, Bhagat said he'd felt self-conscious his whole life about his big belly. But one night in June 1999, his problem erupted into something much larger than cosmetic worry.
An ambulance rushed the 36-year-old farmer to the hospital. Doctors thought he might have a giant tumor, so they decided to operate and remove the source of the bulge in his belly.
"Basically, the tumor was so big that it was pressing on his diaphragm and that's why he was very breathless," said Dr. Ajay Mehta of Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai. "Because of the sheer size of the tumor, it makes it difficult [to operate]. We anticipated a lot of problems."
Mehta said that he can usually spot a tumor just after he begins an operation. But while operating on Bhagat, Mehta saw something he had never encountered. As he cut deeper into Bhagat's stomach, gallons of fluid spilled out — and then something extraordinary happened.
"To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside," he said. "It was a bit shocking for me."
Removing the Mutated Body
One doctor recalled that day in the operating room.
"He just put his hand inside and he said there are a lot of bones inside," she said. "First, one limb came out, then another limb came out. Then some part of genitalia, then some part of hair, some limbs, jaws, limbs, hair."
Inside Bhagat's stomach was a strange, half-formed creature that had feet and hands that were very developed. Its fingernails were quite long.
"We were horrified. We were confused and amazed," Mehta said.
A Mutated Body Within a Body
At first glance, it may look as if Bhagat had given birth. Actually, Mehta had removed the mutated body of Bhagat's twin brother from his stomach. Bhagat, they discovered, had one of the world's most bizarre medical conditions — fetus in fetu. It is an extremely rare abnormality that occurs when a fetus gets trapped inside its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cordlike structure that leaches its twin's blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.
According to Mehta, there are fewer than 90 cases of fetus in fetu recorded in medical literature.
Fetus in fetu happens very early in a twin pregnancy, when one fetus wraps around and envelops the other. The dominant fetus grows, while the fetus that would have been its twin lives on throughout the pregnancy, feeding off its host twin like a kind of parasite. Usually, both twins die before birth from the strain of sharing a placenta.
Sometimes, however, as in Bhagat's case, the host twin survives and is delivered. What makes his case so unusual is that no one suspected Bhagat had a twin inside him for 36 years.
Have I freaked everyone out enough?
What is concerning about the pictures is that it really is just the "tip of the iceberg" so to speak. In treating women with teratomas I can tell you that the pathologic specimen is NOT the worst thing we worry about in medicine. (Yes, there is a lot of shock value in it.) But try to explain to someone that they have a "type" or "form" of cancer. I hate having to tell anyone they are, not only miscarrying, but also are having a severely abnormal pregnancy that needs to be treated with chemotherapeutic agents and a thorough D+C. NOT FUN!
But think for a second about human embryonic stem cells? What guarantees do we have that hES cells will behave as normal cells do? NOT ALL hES cell lines have been tested for normal karyotype. Indeed further work needs to be done before hES cells are introduced into humans. Your pictures elucidate a serious and potential risk very clearly.
-Dr. Regen (cosmeticstemcell.blogspot.com)
5:07 pm
Thanks for your comment, Dr Regan. I have a course, Ethics in Pharmacy at uni, which has raised issues on the use of Stem Cells and also things like Personhood, etc etc.
The thing that freaked me out the most about the teratomas is that they only have half the number of chromosomes a normal person has, so, how then do they grow hair and teeth without a full set of chromosomes? If stem cells are allowed to proliferate in a lab, is this what they will become?
And the fetus-in-fetu was definetely interesting. It's strange to see how it's head seemed to be a mass of nerves. I wonder how long it survived out of the body and what it really looked like.
Like a Gremlin? ET? Yoda?
6:09 pm
99999
5:25 am
My niece who is two years old had a teratoma in her stomach. When cut in half, it had hair and bone in it. She had the surgery on the 30/08/11. What I wanted to know, IS IT CANCER? And what is the possibility that it will not grow back?
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