Acalvaria: Case Report and Review of Literature of a Rare Congenital Malformation

Abstract

Acalvaria, defined as absent skull bones, is an extremely rare congenital anomaly with only a handful of cases reported in literature. Hypocalvaria is its hypoplastic variant where the skull bones are incompletely formed. Due to such a rare incidence, it has been given the status of an orphan disease. In this report we present the case of a female neonate with acalvaria born in our institute. The neonate survived a short and stormy course of 12 days as she also had associated co-morbidities. The condition per se has been described as having high mortality rate. Very few living cases, less than ten have been reported till date.

Keywords

• absent skull bones
• hypocalvaria
• orphan disease