Image: Medical care media
A baby girl was born with a tail that is five-inch-long, "covered in hair and skin" shocking her parents, the medical community, and the doctors who delivered her through a cesarean section in a small remote hospital in Northeastern Mexico, Medical Care Media reports.
According to a case study article in the Journal of Paediatric Surgery, the child was delivered to "two healthy parents" in their late twenties, and there was "no history of radiation exposure or illnesses during pregnancy."
"The appendage was cylindrical with a pointed tip and a length of 5.7 centimeters. Its diameter ranged from 3 to 5 millimeters along its entire length."
Doctors noticed that the tail was covered with hair and skin and when they pinched the appendage, the baby cried.
The radiologist then ordered a lumbosacral x-ray to enable a more thorough examination of the lower back and it revealed no abnormalities or underlying bone structures within the tail.
Image:Medical care media
This indicates that the tail was a "true tail," a benign structure made up of connective tissue, muscle, and nerves, and not a tail like an appendix, whose role in the body has gradually become redundant over time.
The doctors performed several tests to look for various medical issues but found none. Both the child's brain and spine were found to be normal after an MRI examination.
After spinal problems were ruled out, the baby girl underwent another evaluation by the pediatrics and general surgery teams when she was two months old. By the time the experts were confident that there had been an acceptable weight gain and growth for age, the tail structure had expanded by 0.8 cm.
Doctors decided to remove the tail and rebuild the area.
The doctors decided to remove the tail and repair the area using Limberg plasty, which entails creating a diamond-shaped incision (cut) to remove the affected skin and underlying tissue because there was no sign of skin lesions.
No other complications were reported after the child was released.
According to the publication: “Humans with tails are extremely uncommon. There were only 195 cases of human tails identified until 2017 in the most recent review by Tojima and Yamada in 2020, which collected case reports in English, French, Japanese, Italian, and German.”
Image:Medical care media
This is not the first child born with a tail.
The study found that while in the womb, humans can have a "tail," but the tail is usually reabsorbed before birth.
However, the tail can keep growing in some extremely rare circumstances.
Doctors could not perform surgery to remove the tail until an ultrasound revealed that it was not connected to the animal's nervous system. After the ball was removed, the doctors realized it was made up of fat and embryonic connective tissue. The tail itself was simply issued with no bones in it.
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