Tapeworm in Brain Caused Man Pain and Memory Flashbacks
The man is 50-year-old, had suffered memory flashbacks, pain on his right side and complex seizures before the tapeworm in his brain was removed. The worm had been inside his head for four years, said the scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute outside Cambridge, England who published the results in the journal Genome Biology.
The worm matures as it works its way up the food chain to its preferred hosts — cats or dogs. It hatches from eggs and infects freshwater copepods, sometimes called water fleas, which are eaten by tadpoles, frogs or snakes, at which point the worm reaches its more advanced larval stage.
Humans become infected with that larval stage when they ingest these host animals, or in some cases through use of frog-meat poultices applied to open wounds or the eyes as part of traditional medicine in some areas of China, according to the study.
The patient whose brain had been infected, who was of Chinese ancestry, had lived in Britain for two decades but made frequent trips to China, the researchers said. He first reported headaches, seizures and episodes of altered smell and flashback memories in 2008. Multiple tests and scans were inconclusive, but a series of MRI images over the course of four years showed that brain lesions had migrated at least two inches. A biopsy caught the culprit.
This case demonstrates the long-lived and active nature of a sparganosis larva in a human host, and how early diagnosis and recognition of this pattern would benefit future patients, minimizing tissue damage over critical regions of brain. The patient in this case suffered from a variety of neurological symptoms that changed in nature over the course of the infection. It is possible that some of these could have been prevented if the infection was recognized at an earlier stage.
Scientists are eager to learn anything they can about fighting the pest and have already developed some promising drugs.
The man has recovered, though he continues to suffer symptoms from the infection, according to the study.
Reference paper:
Hayley M Bennett et al., 2014. The genome of the sparganosis tapeworm Spirometra erinaceieuropaei isolated from the biopsy of a migrating brain lesion, Genome Biology, 15:510, doi:10.1186/s13059-014-0510-3