Thirty-five-year-old Mummified ‘stone Baby’ Shocks Everyone

Thirty-five-year-old ‘stone baby’ has been found in the womb of a 73-year-old elderly pregnant woman from Skikda, Algeria, with complaints of stomach pain. The pictures were revealed by an x-ray scan performed by the doctors’ team. As the internet went viral with the witness of mummified stone fetus, people exhibited their shock over social media for the ever-outrageous discovery made by the medical facility in eastern Algerian city.

To dig deep into the things, details on how and what of the cause were also revealed. The woman reported having suffered from chronic abnormal body pain, although the presence of the calcified fetus (lithopedion) inside her body was not obvious at that stage (and even led to a good quality of life).

The calcified fetus weighed around 4.5 lbs and aged nearly 7 months. As per the reports, the woman conceived the baby in 1981 but unfortunately suffered a miscarriage.

The Stone Baby

It is known that during certain pregnancy failures (like miscarriages), the body fails to expel the fetus due to blood supply to the fetus. As a result, the body’s immune process calcifies the fetus (foreign object), turning it to ‘stone’ for further protection.

"Most of the time people find these and [sometimes] even after they’re found and don’t do anything about it because they’re totally asymptomatic," says Dr. Kim Garcsi, from University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland.

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However, this is not the first time that the lithopedion existence without any external effect on the body is being reported. There have been nearly 290 cases reported in the history linked to lithopedion as per a 1996 paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Source-Medindia