Indian boy with three genitals undergoes surgery

A two-year-old boy from India has successfully undergone the initial surgery to fix the abnormalities on his genitals. The unnamed boy suffers from the rare condition called diphallia, giving him three penises and an undeveloped anus.

Operated at Sion hospital in July, the child from Uttar Pradesh was born with three genitals, with only one he could use to urinate, Dr. Paras Kothari, head of paediatric surgery in the hospital, told the Daily News and Analysis. Two of the penises had an erectile tissue, or the masses responsible for penile erection, but the third one was undeveloped and non-functional.

The rare condition of diphallia is the duplication of the penis, affecting around one in every six million births worldwide, and a hundred of cases of diphallia were only reported since 1609, Sion doctors said. Diphallia is commonly associated with other abnormalities in the male body, such as gastrointestinal defects or double bladder, according to the doctors.

The doctors removed the undeveloped penis of the patient, and a bony mass of tissue to which his penises were attached were extracted. In the surgery, the two more-developed penises were fused.

"The two functional penises were fused into one, by wrapping a mass of skin around them,” said Dr Vishesh Dixit, a paediatric surgeon at the hospital. The initial surgery lasted for six hours.

In 2013, prior to the genital surgery, doctors from Uttar Pradesh had created an incision on the lower left side of the boy’s stomach to let his stools pass through a tube and be collected into an attached bag. The procedure called Colostomy will aid the absence of the anus, which made the boy unable to pass faeces normally.

The doctors at Sion Hospital tried to remove the child’s colostomy bag after the surgery on his genitals. An anal path was then created through the boy's rectum to facilitate the passage of stools through a new anus.

The boy will undergo the second surgery at the end of August to close the incision in his stomach from the colostomy procedure. The incision will only be closed after the anal path that has been created heals and is capable of function, the doctors said. And the boy’s sexual function and fertility will be normal when he attains adulthood, they added.

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