14 DAY TRIAL // A case report in the journal Brain tells the tale of a woman who lived for well over 2 decades without even suspecting that the anatomy of her brain was not quite right. Simply put, she made it to the age of 24 without knowing she had no cerebellum.
Specialists say that eight other similar cases have been documented by the scientific community until now. Still, these cases all involved infants and children, and they all ended with the patient's dying long before reaching adolescence.
A medical mystery
As detailed in the journal Brain, doctors cannot say for sure when exactly this 24-year-old woman from China lost her cerebellum. Seeing how no traces of cerebellar tissue can be identified in her brain, they suspect she was either born like this or developed the abnormality during her first days of life.
This hypothesis is backed up by the fact that her brain somehow managed to rewire itself, thus making it possible for the woman to reach adulthood without experiencing any severe medical complications, Live Science explains.
Thus, it is only young brains that are flexible enough to be able to adapt to anatomical abnormalities and find a way to compensate for faults in their makeup. The specialists who diagnosed with woman believe this is what happened to her in infancy.
“This surprising phenomenon demonstrates the plasticity of the brain early in life. It shows that the young brain tends to be much more flexible or adaptable to abnormalities,” reads the case report in the journal Brain.
“When a person is either born with an abnormality or at a very young age loses a particular part of the brain, the rest of the brain tries to reconnect and to compensate for that loss or absence,” adds specialist Raj Narayan, who was not involved in the case.
For those unaware, the cerebellum is a part of a brain that is in charge of coordinating bodily movements and controlling precise movements such the ones performed when one uses their mouth and tongue to speak.
Hence, people who lack this brain part display symptoms such as motor difficulties and an inability to articulate words. This woman, however, only experienced dizziness and slurred pronunciation. Granted, she only learned how to walk when she was four, but neither she nor her parents found this a good enough reason to worry.
So, how was she diagnosed?
Interestingly enough, this woman only found out that she was missing her cerebellum after she started experiencing nausea and vomiting on a regular basis. She thought that she had an upset stomach but, when doctors used scans to have a look at her brain, they found that its anatomy was by no means right.
As noticeable in the two images accompanying this article, the woman was found to have a cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid at the back at her head, where her cerebellum should have been. Seeing how this anatomical peculiarity does not appear to bother the woman all that much, doctors say that she will probably get to lead a normal life for many years to come.