14 DAY TRIAL // Few people in this world would ever pass an opportunity to let out a few giggles, but, as it turns out, laughing your heart out does not always feel as good as most assume it does. On the contrary, not being able to stop laughing can prove quite a hassle.
Thus, a paper published in one of the journals of the European Institute of Oncology this past June 16 documents the case of a girl who could not stop laughing not because she found the world around her incredibly amusing, but because she was sick.
More precisely, the paper's authors and the doctors who treated her explain that this 6-year-old girl in Bolivia kept giggling and laughing even in situations that were not in any way amusing due to the fact that she had a brain tumor, Live Science informs.
In their case report, the doctors who treated the girl explain that, when her family first sought help, it was assumed that the girl kept laughing because she had behavioral problems. Specifically, doctors argued that she was spoiled and misbehaved.
“She was considered spoiled, crazy – even devil-possessed,” explains Dr. José Liders Burgos Zuleta with the Advanced Medical Image Center in Bolivia, who helped diagnose and treat the girl. Needless to say, the girl was neither spoiled, nor crazy or possessed by the devil.
In an attempt to establish what exactly was wrong with the 6-year-old girl, Dr. José Liders Burgos Zuleta and his colleagues asked her parents for permission to perform a brain scan. It was thus discovered that the child had a brain tumor.
The tumor, known to the scientific community as a hamartoma, was fairly small and benign. However, it was pressing on the girl's temporal lobe and, therefore, causing her to behave rather oddly, and laugh and giggle when there was no reason for her to do so.
Luckily, doctors were able to operate on the girl and remove the tumor. Following the surgery, the episodes of uncontrollable laughter the girl kept experiencing vanished. She is now perfectly healthy, and doctors reassure than, given the right time and place, she can giggle to her heart's desire.
As detailed in Dr. José Liders Burgos Zuleta's and his colleagues' case report, the laughing episodes that this 6-year-old girl in Bolivia used to experience are known as gelastic seizures. Despite the fact that the seizures caused the girl to laugh, specialists say that the 6-year-old was actually terrified by such episodes.