Lithopedion: laparoscopic diagnosis and removal

Ovarian teratoma: A case from 15th–18th century Lisbon, Portugal

“…Lithopaedion (from the Greek lithos, meaning stone and paidion meaning child) is an obstetric phenomenon where a dead foetus becomes calcified within the abdominal or retroperitoneal space of the mother (Burger et al, 2007). It is an extremely rare phenomenon, occurring in 0.0054% of all gestations (less than 300 have been reported in the clinical literature).…”

Laparoscopic Removal of Lithopaedion

“…To the best of our knowledge this is the first case report of laparoscopic removal of lithopaedion from India. A case was reported in United States [7]. …”

Developmental and Clinical Overview of Lithopaidion

“…In 2000, Passini et al [20] found fewer than 300 reported cases in 400 years of world medical literature; however, from 1968 to 1999 at least 47 new cases of lithopaidion were published. Moreover, it has been confirmed that in the last 10 years, as prenatal care and surveillance have increased, the presentation of lithopaidions is rare [28], even though at least 17 cases of lithopaidions were demonstrated in the last century [1,20,23,25,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,64]; only in this case, we have not considered the 4 cases of lithopaidions reported by Sunday-Adeoye et al [40] because it was not possible to determine the exact century of their occurrence. However, a complete analysis of the English literature has revealed more than 330 case of lithopaidion so far.…”

“…Considering the possibility of future complications, the proper procedure is surgical removal. Although laparoscopy is used to explore the pelvic cavity and manage pelvic masses worldwide, the majority of discovered lithopaidions have been removed by classic laparotomic surgery, with the exception of a case of a young woman undergoing laparoscopy for infertility during which a lithopaidion was discovered [28] and our case of a 32-year-old woman who underwent a laparoscopy for an ectopic fallopian pregnancy. …”

“…Overall, 21 articles were cited twice, 1 article was cited 3 times, and 86 papers were excluded because the abstract was not available (n = 40), the study was not published in English (n = 30) or the subject was not related to the topic of our review (n = 17). Thus, 52 references were selected [1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53]. The full paper was available for 30 articles, and 22 abstracts provided sufficient information.…”