A child who had no symptoms went in for a routine exam, and a heart murmur turned up. That small sound set off a chain of tests that uncovered two rare blood vessel defects at once: a curved vein carrying all of the right lung's blood to the wrong place, and an unexpected shortcut between veins inside the liver.
The case, published online July 30 in the open-access journal Radiology Case Reports, describes a pediatric patient with scimitar syndrome, a rare congenital condition in which veins from the right lung drain into the body's main venous system instead of the heart's left atrium. The authors, most of them from Mother Teresa University Hospital Center and the University of Medicine in Tirana, Albania, called the combination of the syndrome with the liver shunt "exceptionally rare."
