Doctors remove baby skeleton from mother - after 38 years

An Indian woman is believed to have had the world"s longest ectopic pregnancy after doctors removed the skeleton of a baby that had been inside her for 38 years.

Jyoti Kumar, 62, first fell pregnant in 1978 when she was just 24 and fled out of a fear of surgery after doctors told her the child was growing outside of her womb and stood little chance of surviving.

An ectopic pregnancy is when an embryo develops outside the womb (Picture: Alamy)

However after 38 years, Jyoti started to experience stomach pain and visited doctors in Nagpur, where they found the bones of her stillbo child.

‘She said the pain had been consistent over the last two months and we found a lump on the lower right side of her abdomen, and feared it was cancer," said Dr Mohammad Yunus Shah, from the NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences.

Stunned doctors at the NKP Salve Institute say it may be the longest ectopic pregnancy case on record (Picture: NKP Salve Institute)

‘It was only after the patient underwent an MRI that we could make out that the mass was in fact a child"s skeleton."

After removing the bones, stunned doctors poured through medical literature to look for similar cases but found that Jyoti, from Madhya Pradesh, had experienced the longest ectopic pregnancy by two decades.

‘We believe this could be the longest case on record at 38 years," said Dr Shah.