E-Mail karger@karger.com Review Gynecol Obstet Invest DOI: 10.1159/000358828 Developmental and Clinical Overview of Lithopaidion Giuseppe Santoro a Antonio Simone Laganà b Emanuele Sturlese b Valentina Giacobbe b Annalisa Retto b Vittorio Palmara b Departments of a Biomedical Sciences and Morpho-Functional Images and b Pediatric, Gynaecological, Microbiological and Biomedical Sciences, University of Messina, Messina, Italy the maternal abdominal cavity with consequent calcifica- tion [1, 2]. In this review, we performed a MEDLINE search using ‘lithopedion’, ‘lithopaedion’, ‘lithopaidion’, ‘lithokely- phos’, ‘lithokelyphopedion’, ‘lithokelyphopaedion’ and ‘calcified abdominal pregnancy’ as keywords. A total of 162 articles were identified through this search, with pub- lication dates from 1893 to 2013. Overall, 21 articles were cited twice, 1 article was cited 3 times, and 86 papers were excluded because the abstract was not available (n = 40), the study was not published in English (n = 30) or the subject was not related to the topic of our review (n = 17). Thus, 52 references were selected [1, 3–53]. The full paper was available for 30 articles, and 22 abstracts provided sufficient information. All of these articles had been pub- lished in international peer-reviewed journals. In addi- tion, a total of 20 other references were considered: 11 about lithopaidion (9 papers quoted in MEDLINE arti- cles, 1 book chapter and 1 open access article) and 9 ar- ticles related to the physiopathology of the female genital tracts; of these, 8 were published in international peer- reviewed journals, and 1 was a book chapter [54–73]. The essential data of the papers are shown in table 1. Key Words Lithopaidion · Lithopedion · Lithopaedion · Lithokelyphos · Lithokelyphopedion · Lithokelyphopaedion · Abdominal pregnancy · Fallopian ectopic pregnancy Abstract Lithopaidion, or stone child, is generally a single rare asymp- tomatic formation that evolves from an undiagnosed and untreated advanced abdominal pregnancy. The dead fetus is retained in the maternal abdominal cavity, which causes calcification. In this paper, we review the literature on the epidemiology, etiopathogenesis and clinical features of lithopaidion and report a unique case of lithokelyphos in a patient with an ectopic fallopian pregnancy. We propose a model to unify the data. The new word ‘lithopaidion’ can be utilized instead of lithopedion. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel Introduction Lithopaidion (stone child) is a rare formation that evolves from an undiagnosed and untreated advanced ab- dominal pregnancy in which the dead fetus is retained in Received: May 7, 2013 Accepted after revision: January 18, 2014 Published online: March 26, 2014 Giuseppe Santoro Department of Biomedical Sciences and Morpho-Functional Images AOU Policlinic ‘G. Martino’, Via Consolare Valeria IT–98125 Messina (Italy) E-Mail giuseppe.santoro  @  unime.it © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel 0378–7346/14/0000–0000$39.50/0 www.karger.com/goi Downloaded by: Verlag S. KARGER AG BASEL 172.16.7.159 - 3/27/2014 2:42:11 PM