Girl, 1, is found to have a FETUS growing in her skull that was once her twin sister

A one-year-old girl in China was born with a fetus trapped inside her skull, doctors have revealed in a new case report.

Neurosurgeons operated on the girl, who suffered from severe head swelling and developmental delays, but the brain damage was too severe for her to survive and she died within two weeks.

This extremely rare condition is scientifically known as fetus in fetus. Approximately 1 in 500,000 peopleOnly 18 cases of this condition occurring within the skull have been reported to date.

Doctors still don’t know what causes it, but they do know it occurs when identical twins, formed when two eggs split during development in the womb, don’t completely separate.

One twin may then move inside the other’s body and continue to develop characteristics such as nails, hair, hands and feet.

In 80 percent of cases, the resorbed fetal tissue remains in the abdomen, allowing doctors to remove it without harming the patient. In other cases, fetal tissue has been identified in the child’s mouth, scrotum, or tailbone.

For example, in 2015, Chinese doctors The scrotum of a 20-day-old baby.

BBut when the condition occurs in the head, it is nearly 100 percent fatal, say study authors Xuewei Qin and Xuanling Chen, anesthesiologists at Peking University International Hospital. Beijing, Chinateeth, American Journal of Case Reports.

According to the report, during a routine check-up in the 33rd week of pregnancy, doctors discovered some “anomalies” in the developing fetus’s skull.

But her birth was normal, and doctors delivered her via Caesarean section at 37 weeks pregnant. Although her head was larger than average, she went home from the hospital with her mother.

A year later, she was admitted to Peking University International Hospital because her head was swollen and she was not developing normally.

She was incontinent and had difficulty standing, lifting her head, or saying anything other than “Mama.”

So the doctor scanned her head, They found a mass inside the skull that was 5 inches in diameter (13 centimeters), a little bigger than a baseball, with a long chunk of bone embedded within it.

At this point, the doctors decided to operate to remove the tumor: they put the girl to sleep and performed a craniotomy to remove part of her skull.

Inside they found a white capsule containing a thick brown liquid and an immature fetus.

The fetus had a spine, bones, a mouth, eyes, hair, forearms, hands and the beginnings of feet. It was 18 centimetres long.

This caused “severe brain tissue compression.” The patient never woke up and remained on life support after the operation, suffering from seizures.

Twelve days after the surgery, her family decided to take her off life support.

The researchers wrote that the causes of these birth defects “remain a mystery” but may be related to environmental pollution, genetics, cold temperatures, exposure to pesticides during pregnancy and problems with egg division.