Researchers at Oregon State University have recorded a highly unusual case, the probability of which is one in 50 million. A woman who donated her body to science was found to have an anomaly called transposition of organs when they have a mirror arrangement. As a rule, such an anomaly does not prevent people from living a long life, but this woman's heart was located like everyone else's - on the left. It would seem that the wrongly oriented blood vessels would quickly destroy her, but the woman lived to be 99 years old.
Usually the names of people who donated their bodies to science are not disclosed. However, after discovering the sensational arrangement of internal organs, scientists contacted her relatives and they were allowed to tell her what her name was - Rose Marie Bentley. They shared that the woman had lived a long and relatively healthy life and only suffered from arthritis. Three organs have been removed in her entire life, and only one doctor noticed that her appendix is not where it should be.
The woman herself did not seem to notice any oddities at all. An autopsy revealed that everything inside her was not so simple - for example, the upper part of her stomach protruded beyond the diaphragm. Without even noticing the consequences of improper placement of organs, the woman lived until October 2017.
The mirror arrangement of organs with a left-sided heart is extremely rare - about once in 22,000 births. As a rule, in such cases, children have problems with the heart and spine, and only about 13% manage to live longer than 5 years. In history, only two cases were recorded when people with such an anomaly could live to old age - the case of Rose Marie Bentley became the third.
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Ramis Ganiev