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posted by martyb on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-organs-were-off-but-the-piano-was-okay dept.

https://gizmodo.com/a-99-year-old-woman-lived-and-died-without-ever-knowing-1833908646:

A 99-year-old woman in Oregon lived a long life with one of the world’s rarest and often fatal conditions: a body in which most of her major organs were on the wrong side. Even more amazingly, the woman remained blissfully unaware of her unusual predicament. It was only after medical students and their professor got to study her body, which she donated to science, that the strange organ arrangement was uncovered.

The women’s amazing case was detailed by Cam Walker, an assistant professor of anatomy at Oregon Health & Science University, as part of a presentation at the American Association of Anatomists’ annual meeting. And though the identity of someone who has donated their organs or body is typically kept under wraps, the family agreed to disclose her name: Rose Marie Bentley.

[...]“I knew something was up, but it took us a while to figure out how she was put together,” said Walker in a statement.

Eventually, Walker determined that Bentley had a congenital condition called “situs inversus with levocardia.” This meant the placement of Bentley’s organs inside the chest or abdomen were mirrored from the average person’s, with the sole exception of her heart, which remained on the left side of her body (levo being latin for left).

[...]“Normally, what makes [situs inversus] survivable is that all the organs make the same turn. So if the organs in the abdomen are transposed right to left, and the heart follows, that’s great,” Walker told Gizmodo. “But when the heart stays pointed to the left, as with this donor, blood vessels have to change orientation, and that change in orientation commonly leads to serious heart defects.”

These defects in the heart (and oftentimes the spine, too) are usually fatal, and only around 5 to 13 percent of people born with this condition live past the age of five, according to the limited research available.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:31PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:31PM (#828328)

    only around 5 to 13 percent of people born with this condition live past the age of five, according to the limited research available. (...) only able to find two other cases of similar people living into their 70s in the medical literature, so Bentley’s survival was particularly extraordinary.

    The word "extraordinary" is totally justified. Even if it's probably brought by a lack of documented cases (maybe grandma had it, but there are few autopsies of people dead past 80).
    Therefore, it's news.

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