Our Experience in Treatment Acute Surgical Diseases of the Abdominal Cavity in Patients with Situs Inversus Viscerum (Transposition of Internal Organs)

Abstract

Situs viscerumtotalis is a fairly uncommon anomaly of the mirror-imaged arrangement of the peritoneal
cavity organs with a frequency of distribution in the range from 1: 5000 to 1: 20 000. Such an arrangement
of internal organs is found in one case per 10 million2. In the early embryonic stage, the internal organs are
located along the midline of the body. Normally, in the course of their subsequent development, they grow
and rotate to the right, and – exceptionally rarely – to the left, which leads to the reverse arrangement of
internal organs, i.e., to their transposition. In the case of complete (total) transposition of internal organs, all
of them are inverted. In the case of partial transposition, it involves inversion of all or some organs of one
of the body cavities (heart, stomach, duodenum and caecum, spleen). Dextrocardia, a condition in which the
cardiac apex is pointed to the right, was first described by Marco Severino, in 1643. Matthew Baillie first
described situs inversus more than a century later.