Get to know Rose Bentley: the woman who has lived 99 years with organs on the wrong side of her body

Rose Marie Bentley has spent most of her life in a rural town in Oregon where she and her husband owned and operated an animal feed store. In her small town, she sang in the choir, taught Sunday school, and loved gardening. On the outside, his life seemed to be a normal life – that is to say until his recent death.

Bentley had a very special secret that she and her family had not known for nearly a century.

After donating her body to Oregon Health & Science University, medical students soon realized that this 99-year-old woman was living all her life without knowing that she was suffering from a problem called situs inversus. with levocardia – a rare medical anomaly and other abdominal organs were transposed from right to left, but his heart remained on the left side of the chest. Literally, his internal organs (without his heart) reflected those of a normal human.

"I knew something was wrong, but it took us a while to understand how it was prepared," said Cam Walker, anatomy instructor.

The extremely rare disease only occurs once in about 22,000 live births, or less than 0.0045% of the population. But those who reach adulthood? Even less. Walker estimates that only one in 50 million people born with this specific disease will live as adults, as this can lead to life-threatening problems such as conbad heart defects. However, some, like Bentley, may not have badociated health problems if the symmetry of an organ is normal and the condition is isolated. The medical literature indicates that two other known survivors of isolated levocardia and situs inversus who lived until the age of 70 and who were once considered the oldest.

Bentley also had an abnormality called hiatal hernia, which occurs when the upper part of the stomach protrudes from the diaphragm. In addition, its superior vena cava vein (VCS) was exceptionally long. Instead of collecting deoxygenated blood from the head, neck, and upper limbs, Bentley's superior vena cava also collected the deoxygenated blood from the wall of its rib cage and abdominal cavity. Its three veins of the liver also had their own function: to flow directly into the right atrium of the heart instead of pbading first through the inferior vena cava.

Despite all these anomalies, Bentley's family claims that the woman had no other chronic diseases except arthritis. Three organs were removed, including his appendix, which the surgeon noted because his location was abnormal.

Bentley's kids were not aware of her unique body make-up and they thought she probably was too.

"My mother would think it's too cool," said Louise Allee, Bentley's daughter, adding that her mother would have liked all the attention of her one-of-a-kind body. "She would be tickled in pink to be able to teach something like that. She would probably have a big smile on her face, knowing that she was different, but succeeded.

The team presented its findings over the weekend at this year's meeting of the American Association of Anatomists at the meeting on experimental biology.