Man’s Internal Organs All Back-to-Front

By John Farrier in Health on Feb 9, 2010 at 12:21 pm

Situs Inversus is a rare birth defect in which a person is born with organs facing backwards. A patient in India may be the only living person known to have the affliction:

In Mr Shivnani’s case, they discovered the aorta and inferior vena cava, which pump clean blood in and impure blood from the heart were reversed. He also has two livers.

“While operating we were supposed to know the exact location of everything that we are going to touch. But in this case we were not sure which veins were entering where,” Dr Prakash Sanzgiri told the Times of India.

Surgeons also found he had no small intestine and three vessels supplying blood to his infected kidney.

Link | Information about Situs Inversus | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services

Tags: birth defect, Situs Inversus

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Toe-Knee
Feb 9th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
This is not a case of situs inversus, but probably situs ambiguous (as described in the linked article).
Situs inversus is actually fairly common (about 1/10,000 births) and many people that have it don’t even know they do (til they go in for a medical procedure).
It has an interesting relationship to a syndrome called Kartengener’s Syndrome, but I’ll leave that to you all to find out…
Patrick B
Feb 9th, 2010 at 6:08 pm
My first cousin had this. She died about 3 years ago.
She knew but took pleasure in not telling xray techs and doctors up front so she could “watch the fun” as she put it.
Rui
Feb 10th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
A friend of mine also have this when we wants a good laugh he just goes to hospitals and clinics!
Nicholas Dollak
Feb 10th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Organ reversal, in which the organs still face forward but are a mirror-image of their usual arrangement, occurs in about 1 out of every 200 or 2,000 people, making it the “most common deformity.” I had a casual conversation with a surgeon about it and asked what happens if a patient with this is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. There’s a procedure for this, basically consisting of all the attending physicians switching places – takes a couple of seconds.
Katey
Feb 10th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
I was born with an intestinal malrotation, and when they corrected it they took out my appendix because it was never going to be in the proper place, so if I later contracted appendicitis, it would have been difficult to diagnose because the pain would have been in the wrong location.

(That’s a run on sentence and I don’t care.)
Bryanne
Feb 13th, 2010 at 2:42 am
My neighbor and his family have something like this. And he had appendicitis, but it was in his back so doctors were confused at why he was having back pains. Astonishingly he had appendicitis to some degree or another for 2 years until they finally realized what was wrong and took it out.

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