Teenager's stomach pains turns out to be parasitic twin with teeth, hair and bones
Surgeons operating on Narendra Kumar in Uttar Pradesh, India found his embryonic twin in his abdomen feeding off his blood supply
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Your support makes all the difference.An Indian teenager was rushed to hospital with chronic stomach pains only to discover he had had 2.5kg parasitic “twin” living inside him.
18-year-old Narendra Kumar from the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India is one of only 200 people in the world who have been diagnosed with “foetus in fetu” - a rare condition where one twin is absorbed by the other through the umbilical cord during early pregnancy but continues to live inside.
Mr Kumar had suffered from bouts of vomiting and weight loss for years but it wasn’t until they operated on Monday they found the mass of skin, hair and teeth leaching off his blood supply.
Speaking to the Mail Online, Dr Rajeev Singh said: “The boy's stomach grew, but his plight went undiscovered for years because neither his parents were of his medical condition nor the doctors could diagnose the condition at an early stage.
“Technically the foetus was alive and was growing due to metabolic activity in his body”.
He said they had removed a mass of “hair, teeth, a poorly developed head, a bony structure of chest and spine with lots of yellowish amniotic like fluid in the sac”.
The teenager’s father, Prem Chandra, expressed relief the “evil” was finally gone and his son could go back to living a healthy life. Doctors say the malformed foetus is found in the abdomen 80 per cent of the time but it has been known to occur in the brain or the cheek.
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