A Russian woman lived with an inch-long needle in her brain for 80 years, likely because her

• An 80-year-old Russian woman has been living with a needle in her brain since birth, doctors said.
• The Sakhalin Ministry of Health wrote that it discovered the inch-long needle sometime this year.
• They believe she was the victim of a failed infanticide by her parents during times of famine.

An inch-long needle was discovered in the brain of an 80-year-old woman in Russia, said local health officials on Monday.

The Ministry of Health in the Sakhalin region wrote in a Telegram post that local radiologists had found the three-centimeter needle during an x-ray scan.

It did not say exactly when doctors made the discovery but noted it occurred in 2023.

The needle was found in the unnamed woman’s left parietal lobe, per the ministry.

Officials said the needle has been in her brain since the time of her birth, and doctors believe her parents tried to kill her when she was an infant.

In times of war, some desperate parents would insert a needle into a soft spot of a newborn’s head, where bones in the skull hadn’t yet come together, the ministry wrote. That spot — the fontanelle — would then close and obscure the needle, though the infant would die, it noted.

“Such cases were not uncommon during the famine years,” the ministry added.

Now 80, the woman was likely born around 1943.

But she survived the attempted infanticide, and never suffered headaches from the needle, per the Sakhalin health ministry.

Doctors said they would not remove the needle, fearing that surgery would worsen her condition, the ministry wrote.

She is being monitored by a physician, and her health isn’t at risk, it added.

Sakhalin is an island of around 500,000 people off mainland Russia’s southeastern coast. It sits in the Sea of Okhotsk, just north of Japan’s Hokkaido.

Control of Sakhalin was split between the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire in the early 20th century but was seized in its entirety by Moscow during World War II.