14 DAY TRIAL // A recent paper in the journal Genome Biology tells the tale of a Chinese man who had a tapeworm living inside his brain for several years before doctors finally figured out what was wrong with him and removed the parasite.
To pull the worm from inside his head, specialists had to operate on the man's brain. Following this intervention, the patient made a full recovery. The parasite, on the other hand, ended up being cut into pieces by researchers.
A fairly odd medical case
Don't freak out but, apparently, tapeworms are big fans of human anatomy. Thus, it often happens that such parasites set up camp inside people. The thing is that, more often than not, they choose to live in our guts.
However, it sometimes happen that they decide to go on a little adventure and work their way to the brain, the spinal cord and sometimes even the eyes. As explained by specialists, tapeworms go on such quests when in their larval stage.
Writing in the journal Genome Biology, the doctors who handled the case of the Chinese man say that, when present in the guts, these parasites cause symptoms such as abdominal pain, weight loss and weakness.
Seeing how the man had a tapeworm larva living not in his entrails but deep inside his brain, he displayed no such symptoms. Instead, he complained about experiencing headaches, seizures, memory impairment and an altered sense of smell.
When the man first asked for help at a hospital in the East of England, specialists failed to figure out what was wrong with him. Having ruled out all sorts of conditions, they decided to use an MRI machine to have a look inside his brain.
Over the course of about 4 years, they documented what appeared to be a lesion moving some 5 centimeters (about 2 inches) across his brain. Eventually, this lesion was identified as a ribbon-shaped tapeworm larva measuring about 1 centimeter (roughly 0.4 inches) in length.
As mentioned, specialists had to operate on the 50-year-old patient in order to remove the parasite from inside his brain. The man eventually made a full recovery and his life is now back to normal, Eurek Alert informs.
The tapeworm became quite a star
Having removed the tapeworm larva from inside this man's brain, researchers didn't toss it away. On the contrary, they took it back to a laboratory and dissected its genetic makeup. They did so because the parasite belonged to a rare species dubbed Spirometra erinaceieuropaei.
As detailed in the journal Genome Biology, this species is native to Thailand, Japan, South Korea and China. People in these countries risk being exposed to such a parasite when drinking contaminated water or when eating undercooked frogs or snakes.
By the looks of it, the Spirometra erinaceieuropaei pulled from inside the 50-year-old man's brain is the first parasite of its kind to have until now had its genome sequenced by researchers. Scientists say that, now that they are familiar with its genetic makeup, they should be able to develop drugs against it.
To pave the way for the development of drugs against this parasite, the scientists behind this medical case decided to make all the data that they collected while treating the 50-year-old patients and sequencing the worm's genome public.
“We think that it is important to make the genomic data available as is it offers a resource predicting whether other drugs can be repurposed for use in really rare infections such as in this case,” researcher Hayley Bennett from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute explained this decision.
