73-year-old Algerian Woman Carries 35-year-old Stone Baby Foetus

A group of doctors in Algeria, a country in North Africa, recently made a shocking discovery. A 35-year-old stone baby foetus was found in the womb of a 73-year-old woman. The woman had complained of stomach pain. X-ray scans of this elderly woman’s stomach revealed shocking pictures of the stone foetus. According to the report published on the Al Arabiya website, this incident occurred in 2016. The foetus was found to have aged around seven months and weighed 4.5 lbs. Experts opined the Algerian woman had carried the stone baby for 35 years without even realising it. The woman, however, is said to have lived a normal life. This woman suffered from a rare condition called Lithopedion. According to the National Library of Medicine, this term is made from the Greek words lithos (stone) and paedion (child). It is used to describe an abdominal ectopic pregnancy in which the foetus dies but cannot be reabsorbed by the mother’s body. The dead foetus is retained in the abdominal cavity, forming a calcium shell around it.

As per the report published in Al Arabiya, the woman had previously undergone medical treatment. Her unborn baby, however, went undiscovered until 2016. Dr Kim Garcsi talked to ABC News in an earlier interview regarding it. He works in the University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, USA. He said that the calcification of the tissue protects the mother from infection but this also means the foetus can remain undetected for decades. According to Dr Kim, “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.”

As of now, only 290 cases of lithopedion have been documented in the world, according to a 1996 paper. This paper has been published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The earliest recorded incident of this case was in 1582 at the autopsy of a 68-year-old woman in the French city of Sens. This incident was described in a thesis by the physician Jean d’Ailleboust. The woman had carried her lithopaedion for 28 years.