• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Medical Mysteries, Bizarre Cases

Russian man to undergo world's first full head transplant
Thirty-year-old Valery Spiridinov hopes to have his head transplanted on to another man's body in 2017 but some doctors have doubts.
[Video]
By Luke Heighton, video source ITN
5:23PM BST 13 Jun 2015

Mr Spiridinov, however, is more optimistic.
“If I have a chance of full body replacement I will get rid of the limits and be more independent”, he said.
Stage one involves cooling the patient and donor’s bodies in order to prevent the brain cells from dying during the operation.
Next, the neck is partially severed and the blood vessels from one body linked to the other with tubes.
Matthew Crocker, consultant neurosurgeon at St George’s Hospital, London, said every section of the operation has a grounding in current science and practice – at least in theory.
“Excluding blood vessels that supply blood to the brain then restoring them with tubes is very well recognised”, he told Sky News.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...ndergo-worlds-first-full-head-transplant.html
 
Interesting.
So why was a beating heart removed from someone's body? Was he already brain-dead?
 
Maybe he was so high it left of its own accord?
 
Australia: Doctors reattach child's head to spine after car crash [Video]
By Alfred Joyner , Video by Elisa Iannacone
October 7, 2015 12:50 BST

Surgeons at a Brisbane hospital have managed to reattach the head of a toddler to his spine after he was internally decapitated in a car crash. Sixteen-month-old toddler Jaxon Taylor was travelling in the car with his mother and nine-year-old sister when they collided with another car at a speed of 110kph (70mph). The force of the crash tore the toddler's head from his neck internally, but incredibly he survived his injuries.
"It is a miracle," said Jaxon's mother Rylea. "The second I pulled him out, I knew that he, I knew that his neck was broken," she added.

Jaxon was airlifted to a Brisbane hospital where a team of surgeons, headed by Dr Geoff Askin, performed the six-hour surgery to reattach the head to the spine.
"A lot of children wouldn't survive that injury in the first place and if they did, and they were resuscitated, they may never move or breathe again," said Dr Askin.
"They've taken two broken kids and put them all back together, so we're very, very thankful," added the toddler's father Andrew Taylor.

Doctors said Jaxon will have to wear a brace over his head for eight weeks to help the tissues and nerves connecting his head to his spine to heal.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/australia-doctors-reattach-childs-head-spine-after-car-crash-video-1522856
 
The woman who can smell Parkinson's Disease

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-34583642

More at link, including how she smelled Parkinson's in a clinical testing control subject eight months before the subject was diagnosed with it.

"Joy only linked this odour to Parkinson's after joining the charity Parkinson's UK and meeting people with the same distinct odour.

By complete chance she mentioned this to scientists at a talk. They were intrigued.

Edinburgh University decided to test her - and she was very accurate."
 
kamalktk said:
The woman who can smell Parkinson's Disease

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-34583642

More at link, including how she smelled Parkinson's in a clinical testing control subject eight months before the subject was diagnosed with it.

"Joy only linked this odour to Parkinson's after joining the charity Parkinson's UK and meeting people with the same distinct odour.

By complete chance she mentioned this to scientists at a talk. They were intrigued.

Edinburgh University decided to test her - and she was very accurate."
Click to expand...


Dogs and cats seem to have this ability, people don't - very interesting.
 
Don't read before breakfast!
Man died with 'tapeworm tumours'
By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website

A man has died with tumours made of cancerous parasitic worm tissue growing in his organs, doctors report.
The patient had HIV and his weakened immune system allowed the worm-cancer to flourish.
The unusual case was diagnosed through a collaboration between the US Centers for Disease Control and the UK's Natural History Museum.
Doctors said the case, detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine, was "crazy" and unusual.

Colombian doctors had tried to diagnose the 41-year-old man in 2013.
He had what appeared to be normal tumours, some more than 4 cm across, in his lungs, liver and elsewhere in his body.
But on closer inspection the cancerous cells were clearly not human - they were tiny at just a tenth of the size of a human cell.
"It didn't really make sense," said Dr Atis Muehlenbachs, who picked up the "crazy" case at the US Centers of Disease Control.
He ran through several theories including shrinking human cancer cells or even a newly discovered infection.

Eventually, molecular testing identified high levels of tapeworm DNA in the tumours and the reaction was "complete disbelief" from Dr Muehlenbachs.
He told the BBC News website: "This has been the most unusual case, it caused many sleepless nights.
"It should have been obvious this was cancer or an infection and not being able to tell between the two for months is unusual."
The patient was too sick to treat by the time doctors were able to identify the cause of his tumours and he died three days after the worm DNA was discovered.

The worm tissue in question came from dwarf tapeworm - Hymenolepis nana - a specialism of Dr Peter Olson from the Natural History Museum.
"There is something very special about this species," he told the BBC, "It is able to carry out its whole lifecycle in one host and that is absolutely unique."
Around 90% of the worm's body is given over to reproduction as it spews out thousands of eggs into the gut every day.

Rather than the worm getting cancer, it is thought one of these eggs penetrated the lining of the intestines, mutated and ultimately became cancerous.
"They were dividing and proliferating out of control and that is really what defines a cancer so they had a tape worm tumour," Dr Olson said.

Up to 75 million people have an H. nana infection at any one time.
Doctors believe that worm-cancer is rare, but know many cases could be going undiagnosed.
The US Centers for Disease Control said hand washing and cooking raw vegetables was the best way to prevent infection.

There have been some cases of cancers going from one person to another through organ transplant or in the womb.
Another cancer, this time in dogs, has been spread from canine to canine for 11,000 years.

Prof Mel Greaves, the director of the centre for evolution and cancer at The Institute of Cancer Research in London, said the latest case was "interesting and unique".
He told the BBC News website: "What is extraordinary is that it is free cells of the parasite growing and in a cancer-like fashion rather than whole tapeworms.
"Species from almost all invertebrate phyla can develop cancer and the potential seems inherent to animal cells, and particularly the stem cells of multicellular animals.
"What has transpired in this case is that an exceptional combination of circumstances permitted this potential to be expressed in a very foreign host."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34721419
 
Monstrosa said:
No it isn't Rynner. Tapeworm cyst, Californian survival v tapeworm tumours, Colombian death.
Click to expand...
The BBC story was about the same case as the Independent one. (The Guardian report is about a different case.)
 
Farting is good for your health.

Yes, really.

The smell of flatulence has secret health benefits that could help stave off cancer, strokes, heart attacks and dementia, scientists have revealed.

Hydrogen sulfide is one of a number of potent smelly gases produced by bacteria as it breaks down food in the gut.

It is toxic in large doses but in tiny amounts it helps protect cells and fight illness, according to researchers at Exeter University.
Click to expand...
 
"The smell of flatulence has secret health benefits that could help stave off cancer, strokes, heart attacks and dementia, scientists have revealed."

Blimey! I could live forever!
 
rynner2 said:
"The smell of flatulence has secret health benefits that could help stave off cancer, strokes, heart attacks and dementia, scientists have revealed."

Blimey! I could live forever!
Click to expand...
Me too!
I am Sir Fartsalot. That makes me immortal!!! :rofl:
 
Parasitic worm 'increases women's fertility'
By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website

Infection with a species of parasitic worm increases the fertility of women, say scientists.
A study of 986 indigenous women in Bolivia indicated a lifetime of Ascaris lumbricoides, a type of roundworm, infection led to an extra two children.
Researchers, writing in the journal Science, suggest the worm is altering the immune system to make it easier to become pregnant.
Experts said the findings could lead to "novel fertility enhancing drugs".

Nine children is the average family size for Tsimane women in Bolivia. And about 70% of the population has a parasitic worm infection.
Up to a third of the world's population also lives with such infections.

But while Ascaris lumbricoides increased fertility in the nine-year study, hookworms had the opposite effect, leading to three fewer children across a lifetime.
Prof Aaron Blackwell, one of the researchers , from the University of California Santa Barara, told the BBC News website: "The effects are unexpectedly large."

He said women's immune systems naturally changed during pregnancy so they did not reject the foetus.
Prof Blackwell said: "We think the effects we see are probably due to these infections altering women's immune systems, such that they become more or less friendly towards a pregnancy."
He said using worms as a fertility treatment was an "intriguing possibility" but warned there was far more work to be done "before we would recommend anyone try this".

Prof Rick Maizels, a specialist in parasitic worms and the immune system, told the BBC News website: "It's horrifying that the hookworm effects are so profound, half of women by 26 or 28 have yet to fall pregnant and that's a huge effect on life."

Bacterial and viral infections try to outpace the immune system by having explosive population growth.
But Prof Maizels said parasites did the opposite, "growing slowly and trying to suppress the immune system", which is why they make vaccines less effective and lower levels of allergies.

He suggested hookworm may also be causing anaemia and leading to infertility that way.

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34857022
 
The blind woman who switched personalities and could suddenly see
Patient 'B.T' was diagnosed with cortical blindness but when her personality changed to a teeenage boy, her vision returned
Sarah Kaplan
Tuesday 24 November 2015

It had been more than a decade since “B.T.” had last seen anything.
After suffering a traumatic accident as a young woman, doctors diagnosed her with cortical blindness, caused by damage to the visual processing centers in her brain. So she got a seeing eye dog to guide her and grew accustomed to the darkness.

Besides, B.T. had other health problems to cope with — namely, more than 10 wildly different personalities that competed for control of her body. It was while seeking treatment for her dissociative identity disorder that the ability to see suddenly returned. Not to B.T., a 37-year-old German woman. But to a teenage boy she sometimes became.

With therapy, over the course of months, all but two of B.T.’s identities regained their sight. And as B.T. oscillated between identities, her vision flicked on and off like a light switch in her mind. The world would appear, then go dark.
Writing in PsyCh Journal, B.T.’s doctors say that her blindness wasn’t caused by brain damage, her original diagnosis. It was instead something more akin to a brain directive, a psychological problem rather than a physiological one.
B.T.’s strange case reveals a lot about the mind’s extraordinary power — how it can control what we see and who we are.

To understand what happened with B.T. (who is identified only by her initials in the journal article) her doctors, German psychologists Hans Strasburger and Bruno Waldvogel, went all the way back to her initial diagnosis of cortical blindness. Her health records from the time show that she was subjected to a series of vision tests — involving lasers, special glasses, lights shined across a room — all of which demonstrated her apparent blindness. Since there was no damage to her eyes themselves, it was assumed that B.T.’s vision problems must have come from brain damage caused by her accident (the report does not say what exactly happened in the accident).

Waldvogel had no reason to doubt that diagnosis when B.T. was referred to him 13 years later for treatment for dissociative identity disorder, once called multiple personality disorder. B.T. exhibited more than 10 personalities, each of them varying in age, gender, habits and temperament. They even spoke different languages: some communicated only in English, others only in German, some in both (B.T. had spent time in an English-speaking country as a child but lived in Germany).

Then, four years into psychotherapy, something strange happened: Just after ending a therapy session, while in one of her adolescent male states, B.T. saw a word on the cover of a magazine. It was the first word she had read visually in 17 years.

At first, B.T.’s renewed sight was restricted to recognizing whole words in that one identity. If asked, she couldn’t even see the individual letters that made up the words, just the words themselves. But it gradually expanded, first to higher-order visual processes (like reading), then to lower-level ones (like recognizing patterns) until most of her personalities were able to see most of the time. When B.T. alternated between sighted and sightless personalities, her vision switched as well.

That’s when Waldvogel began doubting the cause of B.T.’s vision loss. It’s unlikely that a brain injury of the kind that can cause cortical blindness would heal instantaneously after such a long time. And even if it did, that didn’t explain why B.T.’s vision continued to switch on and off. Clearly something else was going on.

One explanation, that B.T. was “malingering,” or lying about her disability, was disproved by an EEG test. When B.T. was in her two blind states, her brain showed none of the electrical responses to visual stimuli that sighted people would display — even though B.T.’s eyes were open and she was looking right at them.

etc...

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...nalities-and-could-suddenly-see-a6746941.html
 
rynner2 said:
Russian man to undergo world's first full head transplant
Thirty-year-old Valery Spiridinov hopes to have his head transplanted on to another man's body in 2017 but some doctors have doubts.
[Video]
By Luke Heighton, video source ITN
5:23PM BST 13 Jun 2015

Mr Spiridinov, however, is more optimistic.
“If I have a chance of full body replacement I will get rid of the limits and be more independent”, he said.
Stage one involves cooling the patient and donor’s bodies in order to prevent the brain cells from dying during the operation.
Next, the neck is partially severed and the blood vessels from one body linked to the other with tubes.
Matthew Crocker, consultant neurosurgeon at St George’s Hospital, London, said every section of the operation has a grounding in current science and practice – at least in theory.
“Excluding blood vessels that supply blood to the brain then restoring them with tubes is very well recognised”, he told Sky News.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...ndergo-worlds-first-full-head-transplant.html
Click to expand...

This video is relevent (maybe I should've put it on this thread?), seemingly showing broadly similar surgery from 1940 (although the dogs only survived days, due to tissue rejection; but apparently they survived the transplant- 'proof of concept?')

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/1940-russian-dog-head-transplant-video.60733/
 
This PC refuses to play any video at the moment, but if I recall correctly, such an operation has not - up to now, at least - involved re-connecting the nerves, so any such patient would be paralysed. Unless the situation has changed, I can't see the reason for Mr Spiridinov's optimism.

Without sending out too many spoilers, this was also the theme of an under-rated (IMO) movie spin-off from a well-known Fortean-themed TV series. And that didn't end well!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top