In India, an 8-year-old girl was admitted to hospital with severe headaches and seizures. It turned out that she was suffering from neurocysticercosis: around a hundred tapeworm eggs were found in her brain.
It’s a chilling story, reported by the Times of India. Sensitive souls refrain !
In northern India, in Gurugram, an 8-year-old girl called Trushika had suffered from severe headaches for about 6 months and suffered from increasingly frequent epileptic seizures. Faced with the severity of her symptoms, which they could not explain, her parents took her to the hospital.
There, doctors diagnosed Trushika with cysts in her brain and prescribed steroid therapy to cure her. This very heavy treatment made the girl take about twenty kilos: initially weighing 40 kg, she weighed 60 with steroids.
Tapeworm eggs in the brain
But her symptoms continued to worsen. Still in the grip of strong migraines and epileptic seizures, the little girl also suffers from shortness of breath and has difficulty walking.
As a last resort, the doctors then gave him a CT scan and detected a dramatic parasitic infection. “The scan of the baby’s brain showed over a hundred white dots formed by tapeworm eggs,” Times of India Dr Praveen Gupta, Director of the Department of Neurology at Artemis Hospital. “When the eggs reach the brain through the nervous system, they cause neurocysticercosis characterized by severe headaches (severe migraines, Editor’s note), seizures and confusion.”
What does cysticercosis look like on MRI? http://t.co/gnFWfhVEw2 #radiology #medicine pic.twitter.com/kKySZ3N1mE
– Vis-Ta-Mine (@Vis_tamine) December 29, 2013
Trushika was first given decongestants to reduce the swelling in her brain, followed by anthelmintic treatment to destroy the parasitic worms. After taking steroids again, the girl is completely cured: she no longer has migraines or epileptic seizures, can walk again and has returned to school.
A not so rare disease
As serious and impressive as little Trushika’s illness was, it is far from rare in developing countries. Indeed, neurocysticercosis is a tropical disease caused by Tænia solium, a tapeworm transmitted by pigs. Also known as tapeworm, Tænia solium is a parasitic worm that develops in the intestine after eating uncooked pork or coming into contact with sewage.
Credit: a tapeworm in the intestine (selvanegra / iStock)
Hermaphrodite and flat, it can measure up to 10 meters in length. Composed of rectangular rings, it contains numerous eggs which hatch in the intestine, where they can then spread to the brain, but also to the muscles and subcutaneous tissues.The diagnosis of neurocysticercosis is often difficult to establish because there are no specific clinical symptoms.
(Really) generalized cysticercosis. Tenia solium larvae in the brain and muscles https://t.co/3YbDlhTUKl via @NEJM #parasitology pic.twitter.com/sgJ6btFmOg
– Marc Gozlan (@MarcGozlan) December 31, 2016
In 2015, an American student was also diagnosed with this disease. After several examinations, doctors discovered a worm measuring 1.5 millimeters in his brain, which had been removed thanks to an operation. The year before, it was the turn of a Briton of Chinese origin to suffer from severe headaches. His brain MRI revealed the presence in his brain of a living larva of Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, a flatworm close to the tapeworm. Measuring ten centimeters, she had taken up residence there for several years.
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