TRAPPED!!! GIRL STOPPED GROWING AT AGE 2, NOW SHE'S 19!!! (photos)

At first glance Ajifa Khatun could be any little girl, playing with her brothers and sisters and getting a hug from her mother.

Carried by her mother always.

But although Ajifa looks like a toddler, she is in fact 19, having stopped growing just before her second birthday.


Ajifa weighs just 1st 3lbs, and still needs to be spoon-fed and carried everywhere by her mother Apila, 42.


The teenager was a healthy baby when she was born in 1994 and it wasn't long before she started to walk and talk.
See a picture of her younger siblings.

Ajifa,19, Danish 8, Rabiya 14, Rink 17.

However, her development then stalled.

Doctors initially told her mother and father, Sekh, 52, that Ajifa would start growing again.

They then blamed cancer for her condition, before suggesting that it could be a hormone disorder and the family are still at a loss as to why Ajifa is how she is.

Scientists believe that Ajifa could have Laron Syndrome, a rare genetic condition, which is believed to have affected just 300 people across the globe - with a third of them living in in remote villages in Ecuador’s southern Loja province.

People living with Laron lack a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor 1, or IGF-1, which stimulates the cell to grow and divide to form new cells.
 God help her.