Shanghai Surgeons Remove a Baby’s Rare Third Arm

Severe disruptions in early embryonic development can produce polymelia — an extremely rare condition in which a child is born with extra limbs.

When a boy known as Jie-jie was born in April 2006 in Anhui province, China, doctors found he had two left arms. One of them, well formed but not functional in the ordinary way, lay across his chest. Clinicians worried that as he grew, the extra limb would press on his rib cage and complicate his health.

He was taken to Shanghai Children’s Medical Center. On June 6, 2006, an orthopedic team led by Dr. Chen Bochang operated for about three hours.

The extra arm was not a simple attachment. Surgeons had to identify nerves and blood vessels that were formed much as they would be in a normal limb, then separate and remove the inner, less promising arm without damaging the remaining one.

Dr. Chen told reporters the surgery went more smoothly than expected. The baby recovered under observation. The hospital covered the cost for a farming family that could not have paid it alone.

Success did not mean a typical left arm. The limb that remained sat higher on the shoulder. It had no normal palm and flexed in unusual directions. Doctors said Jie-jie would need long-term physical therapy and that they could not promise full function. He also had only one kidney and was thought likely to develop curvature of the spine.

Cases this complete are so uncommon that Chen said his team had almost no published roadmap. Some researchers link extra limbs to a twin that never fully developed. In Jie-jie’s case, both left arms were unusually well formed, which made the choice of which to keep harder.

He left the operating room with two arms instead of three. The harder work — growth, therapy, and living with a rare body — was still ahead.

That is the real story: not a perfect reset, but a careful operation that gave a two-month-old a safer chest and a chance to grow.

Sources: The Guardian, CNN, UPI, CBC, The Times, and Epoch Times reporting on the June 6, 2006, surgery at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center.