14 DAY TRIAL // Some three months after taking her first round of antiretroviral therapy, a HIV-positive woman woke up to find that she was able to hear sounds, but that she was utterly unable to make head and tail of words.
By the looks of it, the 29-year-old woman experienced both headaches and difficulty hearing about a month before she lost her ability to understand words spoken by people around her.
What's odd is that, although she could no longer follow casual conversation, the woman had no issues speaking or pinning down the meaning of written words, Live Science tells us.
“The most interesting part here is having someone tell you, ‘I want to hear; I want to respond; I am very interested - but I don't know what you are talking about,’” Dr. Ashok with the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine commented on this case.
“A young person telling me that - that we don't see very often in our clinical practice,” the neurologist went on to argue.
Hoping to determine the cause of this woman's peculiar condition, doctors used MRI machines to scan her brain. Besides, they collected and analyzed tissue samples.
It was thus discovered that the patient's brain displayed lesions on both its right and its left sides. One of these lesions sat in a region of the brain known as Wernicke's area.
Since this part of the brain is in charge of recognizing language, it is no wonder that, once the lesions formed, the woman lost her ability to understand spoken words. Specialists say that this rare condition is commonly referred to as pure word deafness.
The patient was treated with steroids and, in about 10 weeks' time, made a full recovery. The lesions in her brain also healed.
As far as the doctors who worked on this case can tell, the woman developed brain lesions and came to suffer from pure word deafness as a result of her being an antiretroviral therapy patient. Otherwise put, her odd condition was a side effect of the anti-HIV treatment she was taking.