A Brazilian woman has died after surgery to remove an ultra-rare “stone baby” she had been carrying inside her for around 56 years, the calcified foetus only being detected after a scan for stomach ache.
The scan was taken after Daniela Almeida Vera (81) had originally sought help for a urinary infection. Medics detected the calcified foetus, which is called a lithopedion, during the scan when she complained of stomach pains.
Daily Mail reports that before the shock discovery, doctors suspected she had cancer.
They have concluded that she had been carrying the dead foetus in her body since her last pregnancy more than five decades ago.
Vera, who came from an indigenous tribe and lived in a settlement near Brazil’s border with Paraguay, leaves seven children and 40 grandchildren.
Her operation took place on 14 March and she died while still in intensive care the next day.
One of her six daughters, Rosely Almeida, said: “She didn’t like going to the doctor and she was afraid of the equipment used to carry out tests.”
She also hinted her mum could have been carrying her “stone baby” for longer than the 56 years doctors say because of the pains she had been having since her first pregnancy, which she told relatives felt as if a baby were “moving around inside” her belly.'
The family said she didn’t want to go to the doctors because she was worried she had a tumour.
“She would just take medicine so the pain went away.”
Further tests have now been ordered on the calcified foetus to find out more about it.
Last March a woman died of severe malnutrition in the United States after a lithopedion had blocked her intestines for nine years.
The 50-year-old Congolese woman had reached the US as a refugee and visited a hospital complaining of stomach cramps, indigestion and a gurgling sensation after eating.
Doctors writing in the Journal of Medical Case Reports said the patient believed her health condition was related to a spell someone in Tanzania had cast on her. She died after turning down surgery.
And in 2021, doctors found a “stone baby” inside the womb of an elderly woman in Algeria.
Reports said the 73-year-old had carried the foetus, weighing 2kg, and aged seven months, for 35 years. She was said to have had a good quality of life and was not harmed by the unborn child.
The rare phenomenon occurs most commonly when a foetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy, and is too large to be reabsorbed by the body. It calcifies on the outside as part of a foreign body reaction, shielding the mother's body from the dead tissue and preventing infection.
A 1996 paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine said only 290 cases of lithopedion have ever been documented by medical literature.
The earliest known lithopedion was found in an archaeological excavation at Bering Sinkhole, in Kerr County, Texas, and dated to 1100 BC.
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