Tapeworms Found in Man's Brain Years After He Ate Feces-Tainted Food
Freeman writes:
[...] There, doctors witnessed the man have a two-minute-long tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure, in which he lost consciousness and his muscles aggressively contracted. Doctors began the painstaking process of trying to piece together what was wrong by performing a battery of tests and interviewing his family.
By nearly every account, the man was in very good health. He had no history of seizures or of any cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, or neurologic disorders. His toxicology screens were clear. He took no medications, prescribed or over-the-counter. He didn't smoke and rarely drank. There was no evidence that anything had happened to him recently that would provoke a seizure; the man had spent the previous day with his children, then he had dinner with his brother, who reported nothing out of the ordinary. The only initial hint of the diagnosis to come was that the man had immigrated to Boston from a rural area of Guatemala about 20 years earlier.
But when doctors performed a CT (computed tomography) scan of his head, they quickly narrowed the possibilities. The scan revealed three calcified lesions in his brain, and doctors homed in on the diagnosis of neurocysticercosis. In other words, larval cysts from a pork tapeworm had migrated to his head years ago and nestled into various parts of his brain. The doctors documented their work on the man's illness in a case study published on Thursday, November 11, in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Journal Reference:
Andrew J. Cole, Jonathan E. Slutzman, Edward T. Ryan, et al. Case 34-2021: A 38-Year-Old Man with Altered Mental Status and New Onset of Seizures, New England Journal of Medicine (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMcpc2027080)
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