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

Tapeworms Infesting The Brain

rynner2

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Aug 7, 2001
Messages
54,631
Don't start breakfast yet!
California man has tapeworm removed from his brain in life-saving surgery
Luís Ortíz, 26, became disoriented and started vomiting, and doctors found the larva embedded in a cyst that was stemming the flow of water to his brain
Nicky Woolf in New York
“I was shocked,” Ortiz said. “I just couldn’t believe something like that would happen to me. I didn’t know there was a parasite in my head trying to ruin my life.”Wednesday 4 November 2015 22.20 GMT

When the headaches first started in late August, Luís Ortíz tried to ignore them.
But after a day spent skateboarding in early September, the 26-year-old university student found the pain had become too much to bear.
Ortíz became disoriented, and when he started vomiting his mother rushed him to the hospital, where neurosurgeon Soren Singel found the real culprit: a tapeworm larva lodged in his brain.

Worse, it had embedded itself in a cyst that was stemming the flow of water to his brain, Singel told the Napa Valley Register.
Singel drilled a hole above Ortiz’s eyebrow and fished out the worm and the cyst with a neuroendoscope equipped with a grasping tool. “The worm was still wiggling when we pulled it out,” Singel told the Register.

Where the larva came from remains a mystery. Most likely, it entered his body as an egg in food – most likely pork. Ortiz told a local CBS affiliate that he had “no idea” where he might have gotten it.
But he was lucky to have arrived at the hospital when he did: Singel told the Register that another 30 minutes of the blockage, and Ortiz would have died.

The surgery and the aftermath have greatly affected his life, Ortiz said. He had to drop out of school, move back home and find a temporary place for his dog. He can’t drive or work.
“My memory is like a work in progress,” he said. “It gets better from therapy,” but he has to remind himself to do his memory exercises and other daily tasks.
Ortiz told CBS that the whole ordeal has given him a “new lease on life”, and he told the Register that he had also been “staying away from pork ever since”.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/04/california-man-tapeworm-brain
 
Brain Worm!

Brain-Invading Tapeworm That Eluded Doctors Spotted by New DNA Test
Genetic sequencing of spinal fluid hailed as an advance over standard procedures for diagnosing brain infections
By Kat McGowan on June 22, 2017

Doctors at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital could not figure out what was wrong with the 29-year-old man sitting before them. An otherwise healthy construction worker from Nicaragua, the patient was suffering from a splitting headache, double vision and ringing in his ears. Part of his face was also numb. The cause could have been anything—from an infection to a stroke, a tumor or some kind of autoimmune disease. The Emergency Department (ED) staff took a magnetic resonance imaging scan of the man’s brain, performed a spinal tap and completed a series of other tests that did not turn up any obvious reason for the swelling in his brain—a condition that is formally known as encephalitis.

Most likely, it was some kind of infection. But what kind? Nineteen standard tests are available to help clinicians try to pin down the source of encephalitis, but they test for the presence of only the most common infections; more than 60 percent of cases go unsolved each year.Physicians looked in the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid (which surrounds the brain and protects it) for evidence of Lyme disease, syphilis and valley fever, among other things. Nothing matched. So the S.F. General ED staff settled on the most likely culprit as a diagnosis: a form of tuberculosis (TB) that causes brain inflammation but cannot always be detected with typical tests. Doctors gave the man a prescription for some steroids to reduce the swelling plus some anti-TB drugs and sent him home.

Soon he was back, however, with the same symptoms. This time the physicians assumed the man, whose life was chaotic, had not been taking his drugs properly. (Even people with regular jobs and schedules often find taking TB medications fairly difficult.) The ED staff sent him away with another prescription but he returned again and again—even after he could prove that he was taking his medication correctly and on time. The drugs helped briefly after each visit, but the symptoms always returned. During that year his medical bills reached $580,000. Finally, S.F. General turned to an experimental test that is designed to uncover the source of virtually any neurological infection. ...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...-that-eluded-doctors-spotted-by-new-dna-test/
 
Brain Worm!

Brain-Invading Tapeworm That Eluded Doctors Spotted by New DNA Test
Genetic sequencing of spinal fluid hailed as an advance over standard procedures for diagnosing brain infections
By Kat McGowan on June 22, 2017

Doctors at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital could not figure out what was wrong with the 29-year-old man sitting before them. An otherwise healthy construction worker from Nicaragua, the patient was suffering from a splitting headache, double vision and ringing in his ears. Part of his face was also numb. The cause could have been anything—from an infection to a stroke, a tumor or some kind of autoimmune disease. The Emergency Department (ED) staff took a magnetic resonance imaging scan of the man’s brain, performed a spinal tap and completed a series of other tests that did not turn up any obvious reason for the swelling in his brain—a condition that is formally known as encephalitis.

Most likely, it was some kind of infection. But what kind? Nineteen standard tests are available to help clinicians try to pin down the source of encephalitis, but they test for the presence of only the most common infections; more than 60 percent of cases go unsolved each year.Physicians looked in the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid (which surrounds the brain and protects it) for evidence of Lyme disease, syphilis and valley fever, among other things. Nothing matched. So the S.F. General ED staff settled on the most likely culprit as a diagnosis: a form of tuberculosis (TB) that causes brain inflammation but cannot always be detected with typical tests. Doctors gave the man a prescription for some steroids to reduce the swelling plus some anti-TB drugs and sent him home.

Soon he was back, however, with the same symptoms. This time the physicians assumed the man, whose life was chaotic, had not been taking his drugs properly. (Even people with regular jobs and schedules often find taking TB medications fairly difficult.) The ED staff sent him away with another prescription but he returned again and again—even after he could prove that he was taking his medication correctly and on time. The drugs helped briefly after each visit, but the symptoms always returned. During that year his medical bills reached $580,000. Finally, S.F. General turned to an experimental test that is designed to uncover the source of virtually any neurological infection. ...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...-that-eluded-doctors-spotted-by-new-dna-test/
Another mind-parasite:

Teen dies from tapeworm eggs in brain
 
Here's another tapeworm in the brain story ... In this case the patient displayed symptoms for years before they figured out what was happening to him.
5-Inch-Long Tapeworm Lived in Man's Brain for More Than a Decade

A man in China experienced seizures and other mysterious symptoms for years before doctors finally found the cause: He had a rare parasite living in his brain, which had likely been there for more than a decade, according to news reports.

The man, who lives in Guangzhou, China, said that he began to feel numbness on the left side of his body starting in 2007 ... In the following years, he developed more worrying symptoms, including blackouts and seizures, although doctors failed to find the true cause of his illness.

Then, in 2018, doctors discovered a nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) tapeworm in his brain. He was diagnosed with sparganosis, an infection caused by a type of tapeworm larvae known as Spirometra.

Humans are rarely infected with Spirometra ... — the parasite typically lives in the intestines of dogs and cats, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Other hosts in the parasite's life cycle include fish, reptiles, amphibians and freshwater crustaceans. ...

But humans can become infected if they drink water contaminated with the parasite, or if they eat undercooked meat from animals, such as frogs or snakes, that are hosts to the parasite. The parasite can live for up to 20 years in humans, the CDC says.

Although Spirometra tapeworms occur worldwide, most human cases have been reported in Southeast Asian countries ... . Humans are accidental hosts and can't transmit the disease.

The Spirometra larvae can migrate anywhere in the body, including the eyes, urinary tract, lungs, abdomen and, as in this case, the central nervous system. Brain infections with the larvae can cause a variety of symptoms, including weakness, headache, seizures and numbness or tingling, the CDC says.

Doctors removed the tapeworm from the man's brain during a 2-hour surgery. "The surgery was risky," Dr. Gu Youming, the man's surgeon, told AsiaWire, according to Fox News. "The live tapeworm was moving in his brain, and we had to remove all of it, otherwise the leftover part could grow again." ...
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/spirometra-tapeworm-brain.html
 
... What do they live on in the brain? Lymph? :dunno:

This passage (which I didn't include above) offers one theory based on a previous case in the UK ...

In 2014, a similar case of a brain infection with Spirometra was reported in a man of Chinese descent living in England, according to The Guardian.
At that time, doctors involved in the case said that this type of tapeworm can survive in the brain by scavenging for fatty acids, which it absorbs through its body. ...

Here's a link to the November 2014 Guardian article on that earlier case:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/21/tapeworm-parasite-mans-brain-four-years-china
 
Here's a recently reported case from last year in Texas. This is the first such case I've seen in which a second person (in this case, the patient's sister) had also suffered tapeworm infestation in the brain.
Texas man's headaches caused by tapeworm in his brain

Doctors in Texas said a man who came in complaining of frequent headaches and a fainting spell may have had a tapeworm in his brain for over a decade.

Officials at Ascension Seton said the Austin man came in after fainting in the middle of a soccer game last year and told doctors he had been experiencing severe headaches for months.

An MRI revealed the man had a tapeworm inside his brain.

The worm was removed surgically and the man is now recovering and reported to doctors that his headaches have ceased.

Doctors said the man may have contracted the tapeworm by eating under-cooked pork in Mexico more than a decade ago. They said the man's sister previously had a tapeworm removed from her brain years earlier.

It was unclear whether the siblings contracted their tapeworms at the same time.
SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2020/0...-by-tapeworm-in-his-brain/9051580146190/?sl=1
 
This is the first known native Australian case ('native' = no foreign travel / immigration involved).
A woman in Australia discovered her headaches were caused by tapeworm larvae in her brain

A 25-year-old woman in Australia discovered she had tapeworm larvae in her brain after suffering from a headache that lasted for more than a week.

The aches were caused by tapeworm larvae that had taken up space in her brain, according to a new study on her case by the The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene published on September 21.

The woman, who never traveled overseas, is the first native case of the disease in Australia, the study said. Previous Australian cases of this infection were from immigrants or returning residents who traveled to regions where the disease is endemic to, such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

For the past seven years, the woman complained of headaches that would occur two- or three-times a month and went away with prescribed migraine medication. However, her latest headache lasted for more than a week and came with more severe visual symptoms, including the blurring of her central vision. ...

An MRI of her brain led doctors to believe that a tumor might be the cause of her pain, but after operating and removing the lesion, they discovered it was actually a cyst full of tapeworm larvae. After the removal, she required no further treatment.

This condition is known as neurocysticercosis, which can cause neurological symptoms when larval cysts develop in the brain. People who get the parasitic infection do so by swallowing eggs found in the feces of a person who has an intestinal tapeworm, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Neurocysticercosis is deadly, and a leading cause of adult onset epilepsy worldwide, the CDC said.

FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/03/australia/australia-tapeworm-headache-brain-scn-trnd/index.html
 
Here's a case study involving a man in the Boston area.
Otherwise Healthy Man Found to Have a Disturbing, Unexpected Visitor in His Brain

Three years ago, a family in Boston was thrown into chaos during the small hours of the morning. A man, who moments ago had been sleeping soundly next to his wife, was on the floor convulsing, and nobody knew why.

He was confused, uttering nonsensical words and tried to resist being taken by ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital. There, through a painstaking diagnostic process, doctors discovered an unwelcome brain guest. ...

The 38-year-old man was treated with lorazepam for the seizures, but it took yet more work to find out what had caused them in the first place. ...

The patient's history did provide a clue. He had migrated from a rural area of Guatemala 20 years ago. ...

Brain scans revealed three calcified lesions. Given their presentation and the patient's history, the doctors concluded they were cysts belonging to the parasitic pork tapeworm (Taenia solium). These white, ribbon-like worms rely on human hosts to reach the adult phase of their lifecycle, where they latch onto the small intestine with dozens of little hooks ...

Pigs are the most common intermediate host, but sometimes other humans or even the originally infected human eat the tapeworm eggs, too. They hatch in the intestines of their devourer and the resulting larva bore their way into the bloodstream, preferably to nest in tasty pig muscles that can then transport them back to humans who've eaten undercooked meat.

However, the resulting cysts the larva form can develop in any organ, and it is these that cause the most severe problems – especially if they establish themselves in the brain. ...

This condition is called neurocysticercosis and it's the leading cause of acquired epilepsy in many parts of the world – including Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. ...

As for this case, the man was treated with anti-inflammatory, anti-seizure, and two antiparasitic medications. He was released from the hospital with no remaining symptoms after five days, and remains seizure free three years later.

However, he'll likely need to continue taking the anti-seizure medication.

"The issue of when to stop the medication is problematic, because the calcified lesion will remain in perpetuity" ...
FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencealert.com/an-oth...-a-disturbing-unexpected-visitor-in-his-brain

PUBLISHED CASE REPORT:
Case 34-2021: A 38-Year-Old Man with Altered Mental Status and New Onset of Seizures
Andrew J. Cole, M.D., Jonathan E. Slutzman, M.D., Edward T. Ryan, M.D., et al.
N Engl J Med 2021; 385:1894-1902
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMcpc2027080
 
Back
Top