A woman has gone viral on TikTok after doctors discovered a baby made of 'stone' growing inside her abdomen. "A 73-year-old Algerian woman presented to the emergency department with abdominal pain," a doctor said in the original clip on the social platform. "They did studies of her abdomen and found she had a lithopedion. This is a foetus, who passed away 35-years earlier."
To explain exactly what is going on, Dr Karan Raj (who's well known on the platform when it comes to all-things-health) asked his 4.6 million followers: "Are you ready to learn about stone babies?"
A 'stone baby', Dr Raj points out, is known as a lithopedion and can happen "when a foetus dies during an abdominal ectopic pregnancy." An ectopic pregnancy, the NHS website explains, "is when a fertilised egg implants itself outside of the womb, usually in one of the fallopian tubes." Unfortunately, it's not possible to save ectopic pregnancies, which require removal using medicine or an operation. In the UK, around 1 in every 90 pregnancies is ectopic.
Dr Raj continued: "This is an incredibly rare type of ectopic pregnancy when the foetus grows outside the uterus. If the deceased foetus is too large to be reabsorbed by the mother's body, it becomes a foreign body to the mother's immune system."
In the very rare case that this happens, Dr Raj explains that "to stop the dead foetal tissue causing infection, the mother's body will calcify the foetus which is gradually modified to become a 'stone baby'." Given just how rare cases like this are, a lithopedion could go undiagnosed for decades, and often will only be found if the woman goes in for a scan for a separate health-related issue.
Understandably, the bizarre clip caused quite the confusion amongst TikTokers, who branded the phenomenon "freaky" and took to the comments section to share their concerns. "New fear unlocked", commented one person, with someone else asking: " Is it attached to your bone or can you just remove it?"
Everyone's clicking on...
A third follower simply said, "Isn't it crazy what our bodies can do naturally?"
While the thought of a 'stone baby' growing inside you is, rightfully, quite concerning, it's important to remember that lithopedion's are extremely rare. In fact, a study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine found that, approximately, there's only been 290 cases ever documented in medical literature.
