Doctors in Israel were stunned in 2021 when a newborn baby girl was found to have the remains of a parasitic twin embedded in her own abdomen. The condition, known as fetus-in-fetu, is exceedingly rare and occurs in only around 1 in 500,000 births.
Scans performed throughout the mother's pregnancy indicated that something was inside the growing baby's stomach, but doctors weren't able to discover what it was until the child was born.
The hospital's director of neonatology, Omer Globus, told the Times of Israel that the team didn't expect to find the remains of an embryo. "We were surprised to discover that it was an embryo." On top of that, it turns out there was more than one inside the baby. "We think that there was more than one there, and we are still checking that."
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The doctor also insisted that it's important to understand the baby girl did not have a fully developed embryo inside of her. However, doctors could identify partial remains, including a heart. "But it did not look like an embryo as you imagine it," he explained.
The baby and her mother are both doing well and have already returned home, where the mother has three other children. Now the doctors are speculating about what might have happened in the first place. Sometimes, cases like these happen after a pregnancy begins as twins, but one twin is absorbed by the other.
Dr. Globus said, "It happens as part of the fetal development process when there are cavities that close during development and one of the embryos enters such a space. The fetus inside partially develops but does not live and remains there."
Dr. Neeraj Desai, the managing physician of the maternal fetal medicine division at Orlando Health Winnie Palmer Hospital in Florida, spoke about the phenomenon with the Today show. Dr. Desai explained, "It’s not something that a regular person should even think about worrying about what could happen to their baby."
He also offered an explanation for those who are curious about how exactly something like this happens in the first place:
"(As babies develop) we kind of fold in on ourselves so the one twin almost encapsulates the other developing twin and that’s how it gets inside. But then it starts to use the blood supply of the ‘healthy’ twin and so in that regard it’s like a parasitic twin."
Dr. Desai also explained that the "twin" never has a chance at fully developing. "It will never develop the full baby because it never gets enough of what it needs," he said. "If this baby inside were to get just as much blood from inside the other baby then potentially it could develop into a whole baby. But it will never be in that big of an environment."
