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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.
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.
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
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.
of course there's an explanation - she's 1/2 cylon.
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
The telomeres are normal, and match up with her actual chronological age.
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.
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.