Baby Born With Three Arms Undergoes Successful Operation To Remove Extra Limb
A baby with three arms, born in the Gujarat region of India with a rare condition affecting roughly one in a million people, successfully underwent an operation to have his additional limb removed at the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital.
The baby was born with his right arm in the normal place, but two arms on his left side. The child was taken to the Ahmedabad Hospital, where doctors carried out a procedure to remove the extra limb when he was just over two weeks old, as reported by Opposing Views.
The infant, who is originally from Bhavnagar, also in the Gujarat region, suffers from a rare condition called Polymelia, which causes people to be born with extra limbs. The disorder occurs as the baby grows in the womb, whereby the cells form abnormally during embryonic development. The embryo begins to develop as conjoined twins, but then, one twin stops growing.
The Ahmedabad Mirror reported that a CT scan revealed that the child was born with a club foot, was missing a kidney, and one of his testicles was inside his stomach.
Before carrying out the procedure to remove the additional limb, Dr. Joshi told the Mirror, “We realised that apart from the extra arm on the left side and baby had a right club foot and a missing kidney.”
The rare condition is a birth defect that only affects only one in a million infants, as mentioned before, and is therefore difficult to research.
In 2005, a baby girl named Destiny was born with a fully formed extra leg in Detroit as a result of a conjoined twin not fully developing in the womb. In March 2006, a baby boy called Jie-jie was born in Shanghai with a fully formed third arm.
The best known case of the condition was Lakshmi Tatma, from India, who was born with eight limbs. as a parasitic twin who had stopped developing and died in the womb was attached to her body.