Doctors confused after ‘perfectly healthy’ baby girl is born with no limbs
Doctors were left baffled after a baby girl was born in India with all four limbs missing – but otherwise seemed ‘perfectly healthy’.
A video of the baby girl, from Sakla village of Sironj Tehsil in Vidisha, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, was released yesterday.
Reports say the baby was born with an autosomal recessive congenital disorder, called Tetra-Amelia, characterised by the absence of all four limbs.
The video shows a woman holding the baby in her arms, and the infant, wrapped in a cloth, can be seen without arms or legs.
Dr Suresh Aggarwal, a paediatrician at Rajiv Gandhi Smriti Hospital, Sironj, suggested the baby is otherwise perfectly healthy.
Tetra-Amelia syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by mutations in the WNT3 gene, and is extremely rare.
According to Bhopal CMHO and paediatrician Dr Prabhakar Tiwari, the syndrome affects one in 100,000 newborns. He said this is the first he has seen in his career.
A 2011 study by Dr Eva Bermejo-Sanchez of the Research Centre on Congenital Anomalies (CIAC) at the Instituto de Salud Carlos III in Spain shows that the disorder occurs in roughly one out of every 71,000 pregnancies.
The lungs are underdeveloped in many cases, making breathing difficult or impossible.
The doctors suggest the baby will be taken in for further assessments to check if her internal organs have developed as normal.
The case follows Nicholas James Vujicic, born in 1982, an Australian Christian evangelist and motivational speaker born with tetra-amelia syndrome.
Author of several books and travelling over 44 countries, Vujicic advocates positivity and motivation even after being born without all four limbs.
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