Case #23

April 14-28, 2000

Submitted by Marcos Tawil, MD, Mexico, and Philippe Jeanty, Nashville TN

The mother is 27-year-old G3, P2. Her first baby is normal, but the second child died a couple of weeks after birth from complication of a birth defect with an autosomal recessive transmission. We present several images of a 14-week triplet (triamionic, trichorionic) pregnancy. Two of the fetuses are normal, but the third one had a very unusual position. All pictures are from the affected fetus.

The head

The neck

The right arm, wrist and hand

The left arm, wrist and hand

Both femurs

The right leg, ankle and foot

The left leg, ankle and foot

There is also a video (1.8 MB) that shows the anomaly better (in particular the motion which is absent from the images. 
Remember that if you use Window Media Player you can do "freeze-frame" and do almost a frame by frame review.