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Doctors Baffled, Intrigued By Girl Who Doesn't Age
phyrebyrd writes "Brooke Greenberg is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler. She turned 16 in January. Brooke hasn't aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa, says Brooke's body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why. Brooke's hair and her nails are the only two things that grow, Howard said. 'She has pajamas and outfits that are 10 or 12 years old,' he said."
Reaching adulthood and then preserving the body of a 20-year-old forever is one thing. This is quite something else.
It is not so much failure to age, as failure to grow/mature. It remains to be seen whether her abnormality will grant longer life span in practice.
Aging is the result of accumulated bio-chemical damage and degeneration. While failure to grow does have some beneficial effect from on biological aging--e.g. both calorie restriction and growth-hormone deficiency appear to enhance lifespan, at least in mice--it is quite likely that this girl's condition was simply misreported.
I was thinking the same thing but this is a bit different.
I was actually expecting to hear someone say something like "Call me when she's 18..." While some might say that's horrible or gross or whatever, I have to say that it is some kind of irony considering the generally arbitrary rules and laws we have regarding age and eligibility.
Regardless of age, there are laws against sex with people with diminished mental capacity, who cannot give consent.
Mental maturity also has implications in the growth and development of the brain, neural pathways being formed, other changes. If those things never happen, BAM, infant forever.
Very interesting. I'd wager its a bunch of hormone triggers never triggering, which is usually the root cause of age/size related stuff. I knew a kid when I was younger who lacked certain hormones in the correct proportions, so while he was my age mentally, and in actual years, he was about 5 years behind me in physical development, and had to take hormone shots.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I wonder what the cause of diminished mental capacity might be?
While I am not aware of the particulars of this case, as a doctor I can state that myelinization of nerve cells inside the brain is what is believed to contribute to increased cognitive ability. Babies are born with roughly the number of neurons (nerve cell) they will have for the rest of their lives, however these neurons are not fully coated in myelin. Myelin increases the efficiency and conductivity of a neuron, and is synthesized by cells surrounding the neuron. However this production takes time - a few years in the case of neurons outside the brain - which explains why babies are also clumsy. Myelinization of the brain itself takes roughly 20 years.
I suspect that this patient isn't producing myelin, among other things, and therefore will never reach her cognitive potential.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
According to TFA, she's already had cancer, and it just sort of went away with no explanation.
Wouldn't be so sure of it. From the article:
In her first six years, Brooke went through a series of medical emergencies from which she recovered, often without explanation. She survived surgery for seven perforated stomach ulcers. She suffered a brain seizure followed by what was diagnosed as a stroke that weeks later left no apparent damage.
At 4, she fell into a lethargy that caused her to sleep for 14 days. Then, doctors diagnosed a brain tumor, and the Greenbergs bought a casket for her.
"We were preparing for our child to die," Howard Greenberg said. "We were saying goodbye. And, then, we got a call that there was some change; that Brooke had opened her eyes and she was fine. There was no tumor.
That was in the article I read about her. She has had cancer and other issues that seemingly healed themselves.
citation needed
Sure, I'll bite. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19492313?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
But are people with, say, Alzheimer's aware of what they are missing out on?
I would say that yes, in the early stages they quite often are aware of it. My grandfather had Alzheimer's before he died, and was constantly upset by all of the things he couldn't remember, even from a few minutes ago. Eventually he gave up trying, and started just living further and further in the past, since it was all he could remember. My grandmother on the other side is now in the early stages of it as well, and realizes exactly what's happening. Oddly enough, she's sufficiently upbeat about it that she actually jokes that it won't make much difference, she's always been a stereotypical blonde anyways, and could never remember things properly before it started - the only difference is that now she's got an excuse.
Sorry smallfries.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
He said "usually" not "always." Might want to grab a dictionary and check the difference. :P
Old age is a feature, not a bug. With less turn-over it would be difficult to life as a whole to adapt to changing environment. It has drawbacks as knowledge lost by the dead individual. Advanced life forms overcome that with culture.
Earlier simpler life forms probably lacked the aging feature, and were superseded by others who had it.
The question of what causes age has been answered satisfactorily for some time. The cause is the fact that selective pressure decreases with age on account of mishaps associated with being alive. For example, after 10 years, a fly not subject to old age will have a far greater chance of being eaten by a spider than a 10-day old fly, so whatever genes allowed the former to live that long are most likely already lost.
By contrast, your off-the-cuff theory is hard to support. What of sharks, or other organisms that have hardly changed at all since prehistoric times? Surely they should live extremely long lives by now, since they do not need to "make room" for new editions.
The whole idea of "making room" for new versions is curious, because if the new versions are indeed superior, they should be able to out-compete the old versions.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
All living things don't age. There are lots of organisms that don't have distinct progeny, and that have in effect been alive for a long long time.
She's still a person, even if she doesn't have a life like you and me. Don't you think your logical approach and cynism are useless here? Her parents love her. Should we kill her anyway?
Think about killing old people with Alzheimer. Would that be the 'right' thing to do?
You took a big logical jump about my sig. There is no saying about killing the ones who don't have a life.
I don't remember bashing someone here in /. but you really sound like a dumbass. Sorry.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
of course there's an explanation - she's 1/2 cylon.
As seen in Fig. 6, the subject's PBMC telomere length at 13 years of age was significantly shorter than that of an age-matched female control as well as male and female controls of younger ages. While variability in average telomere length exists between individuals, the low subject values are probably not due to errors in measurement since the coefficients of variation were sufficiently low to assume adequate precision. Although the subject's telomeres were nearly half the length of a healthy, age-matched female control, this comparison in and of itself does not prove that her cellular age is advanced beyond that of the normal girl. However, an important observation relevant to this difference is that there occurs a precipitous loss of telomere length during early life after which a plateau period is reached (Frenck et al., 1998). As a result, telomere length in newborns is longer on average than that in adolescents so that comparison of the subject's telomeres with newborn controls would be expected to provide more reliable estimate of her cellular age range. For example, significant shortening would be expected if her cellular age proceeded as usual despite her severe developmental delay whereas longer telomeres would suggest that her cellular aging was delayed consistent with that of her somatic development. However, this was not the case. Subject's telomeres were considerably shorter than those of both infant controls as well as the age-matched control suggesting that her cellular age was advanced beyond infancy. Since the rate of telomeric shortening is substantially greater in infants than in adults (Zeichner et al., 1999), subject's prolonged infancy may have caused her to have shorter telomeres than age-matched controls. In addition, accelerated telomeric shortening has been reported in developmentally abnormal conditions including progeroid syndromes (Kruk et al., 1995). These circumstances may have resulted in her cellular age being appropriate for or perhaps even greater than her chronological age. Consistent with other reports showing a lack of telomerase (telomere terminal transferase) expression in human dermal fibroblasts from children (Oâ(TM)Donnell et al., 2008), subject's fibroblasts were telomerase negative. This fact suggests that possible enhancement of telomeric erosion did not stimulate compensatory increases in enzyme activity.
Pulled from: Richard F. Walker, Lawrence C. Pakula, Maxine J. Sutcliffe, Patricia A. Kruk, Jesper Graakjaer, Jerry W. Shay, A case study of 'disorganized development' and its possible relevance to genetic determinants of aging, Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, Volume 130, Issue 5, May 2009, Pages 350-356, ISSN 0047-6374, DOI: 10.1016/j.mad.2009.02.003.
If the telomeres in fast-dividing cells are staying long, then she really will live for ever.
As discussed here back in 2005, there are actually seven significant hurdles to stopping aging. Telomeres are only one of them.
Advice: on VPS providers
We are all one, yet are all different.
...he's looking for a little recognition. Seriously, has no one ever read, watched, or heard of Der Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum)?
It's about a little boy who decides not to grow up and his body doesn't age. IT WON THE FREAKING NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE!!!
Geez, you people.
The telomeres are normal, and match up with her actual chronological age.
"fit to the last detail"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_dwarf has descriptions of various forms of PD, none of which seem to match very well.
A medical journal article on her can be found here: http://www4.utsouthwestern.edu/cellbio/shay-wright/publications/MechAgeDevel-Publication-4-1-09.pdf
Cancer is by definition a failure of the body to deal with genetic damage. The reason you're not already dead of cancer is because the body has mechanisms for dealing with such damage (which happens all the time). The reason people die of cancer is because at some point a specific set of genetic damage happens that bypasses those safety mechanisms. It's a question of when rather than if.
Lou Gehrig and the eponymous legionnaires are the rare exception.
Perhaps you've heard of Alois Alzheimer, Hans Asperger, Thomas Hodgkin, James Parkinson, or Georges Tourette. Then again, probably not. But you've most likely heard of Alzheimer's Disease, Asperger Syndrome, Hodgkin Disease (or at least non-Hodgkin Lymphoma), Parkinson's Disease, and Tourette Syndrome.
Episode Eight, season four the solution ended up being Lupus.
They eat a lot of fish (omega fish oils), sushi (low in fat/salt/sugar), soup (low carb), tea (antioxidents), and fruit (antioxidents, vitamins, fiber). Food is a major factor.
Camping on quad since 1996.
The puzzling thing is, she didn't respond to HGH treatment at all - which seems to indicate that whatever is happening, it's more complicated than some pathway that sits above the HGH pathway malfunctioning and so not causing the HGH pathway to trigger on time. If that were the case, then one would expect her body to respond to the HGH when she finally started getting it - but she didn't.
I wasn't explicitly talking about colonies, I was talking about things, such as single celled organisms many of which don't for colonies, that divide through division, such that neither of the resulting genetically identical resulting organisms can be distinguished as the parent. (as opposed to things that reproduce with genetically identical off spring, but a clear parent and child relationship) I guess what I am saying is that when an amoeba divides, you don't say that the amoeba died and had two off spring, you say that the amoeba divided, and as such both are still that original amoeba unless maybe one of them also underwent some genetic change. Single celled organisms are the easy example, but there are some more complicated ones.
What if she is the first person not to have the disease we all have and that she is aging but really really slow?
That is an interesting thought. There's actually some molecular evidence that aging, on a cellular level, is a result of a specific mechanism, not just a general and inevitable accumulation of damage.
This paper is... well one I haven't actually read. But I did see a seminar by the author. He suggested that accumulation of a specific protein fragment was causing aging. It was found in one of those premature aging diseases (Hutchinson-Gilford progeria specifically) with increased abundance, but they do find it accumulates as people get older, changing some cell mechanisms. The theory was that the full length protein, which has important normal functions, was cut in a specific way with low frequency, but over time the fragments build up and interfere with different processes, the effects of which seem to mimic aging.
Of course, it's not definitive that this is how you age, and there are several other mechanisms which might be causing aging in specific ways, but the implications of the theories are interesting: it might be possible to block those pathways to stop aging.
Unfortunately for this specific girl, I don't see anything to indicate she's not aging, I think it's probably she's just not actually growing. Growing and aging do appear independant, as progeria patients appear to age more rapidly but don't grow rapidly. It is possible that whatever is keeping her from growing will also prevent her from aging, but I don't see any reason to expect that.
In Brazil there is a case of a 29 years old woman with the same "disease". The TV program that showed her is very sensationalist, the case is real. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3THlCV9hXTw (it's in Portuguese, but you are not missing much)