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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."
It just struck me reading that... it must really, REALLY suck being the first person to ever have a particular disease.
She must've drank from it by mistake. This is why Moms should be attentive of their children!
Seriously, age is a really interesting field to me, especially cognitive age. I really like how there are stages in raising a child that, if followed honestly, usually lead to children becoming very capable, healthy adults. What's even more interesting is what happens to a child should the development of any of those stages be tampered with.
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And it appears that, at 16, she still has the brains and skill set of an infant ... this is going to sound cruel, but without any more details, it sounds like a good argument for post-birth abortion. I mean, what's the point? At least "The Strange Case of Benjamin Button" had SOME growth of character.
Wow...that is absolutely amazing...and she is so fortunate to have a family that sees the situation so positively...and who supports related research by the scientific community to see if there is a potential broader benefit here. Frankly, it must be tough for them at times, but I am sure that my wife would *love* it if our little girl never grew up. Thank goodness her sisters are supportive, because they will most likely need to take care of her in the future after her parents advance in age. Great stuff.
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.
The article says that her brain has hardly changed at all - it's still an infant's brain. If you read the article, you'll see that the parents and those around her who claim to see changes or improvements in her ability to communicate are projecting their wishes, same as people do with their pets - except that pets CAN grow and learn. Brooke can't.
Imagine if your brain suddenly never changes. You can never learn a new thing, remember anything from even 5 minutes ago, etc. Before the movie "50 First Dates", there was a sci-fi short story that posited this, with horrifying consequences. It would be the worse than having Alzheimers.
Dude. Lay off the weed.
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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.
Years ago I read about this girl who was 19 and had never entered puberty (she had developed normally otherwise). Turns out there was a tumor blocking her pituitary gland. I'm sure they've done hundreds of tests so it can't be something like that but I was just reminded of that story.
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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.
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Except for the one time where it was lupus.
High school girls stay the same age as well. Giggity giggity.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
not that i know a damn thing about endocrinology, but i would speculate that this failed therapy suggest that, as we all have receptors for various hormones, her body has no such receptors for HGH. if someone is born genetically male, but has no male secondary characteristics, then either:
1. his body produces no testosterone,
2. his body produces testosterone, but his body doesn't react to it
i would say that this girl, uh, young woman, has an incredibly rare, unique mutation: insensitivity to human growth hormone. it would explain all of her symptoms
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Man, I've been through so many drugs I've almost become a Christian.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Well, now, there are two aspects to this: brain growth, and learning.
A human's brain is pretty close to adult size and mass by the age of 5. You can say that this is the scaffold on which the remaining 5% of mass growth is built on. But more importantly, the cells (both in that initial 95% and subsequent 5%) are growing connections to each other, and these connections seem to be based on learning. White matter also is slowly replaced to a small degree with gray matter; white matter is "wiring" between active cells of gray matter "processors".
This may explain, to some extent, why the (physiologically very) young lady in TFA is functioning intellectually like a toddler: her uneven growth affects the basic brain development you'd expect in early childhood (the 95% mass mentioned earlier), so the brain lacks structural complexity to grow "learning connections". I suppose restricted brain growth is fortunate, in a sense; if her cranium hasn't grown, age-appropriate brain growth would be bad.
IANADoctor. This is just how the described phenomena match up in my mind with the little childhood development (psychology/anatomy) studies and basic physiology I've learned here and there. YMMV.
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"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Some of her body part , like bone structure, are 10 years old. Thus it sounds doubtful she will reach the multi-centenarian age you cited. They tried to communicate with her , tried to teach her speaking but it failed. Anyway there is a rearrangement of the pharynx/larynx at the venerable age of 1/2 years old which is needed to be able to physically speak. Without it you can't. Maybe a doctor/biologist can chime in.
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She has pajamas and outfits that are 10 or 12 years old,' he said.
That's nothing, I work in an office with some programmers who haven't changed their outfits in over twenty years.
Mr. Taucross, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
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So clearly an HGH deficiency isn't the (only) issue, it's that her HGH receptors don't respond to the hormone. But, to the best of my knowledge, that wouldn't account for a lack of mental development. This sounds like a combination of many factors coming together.
I'll have to take a look to see if there's anything written from a medical perspective (e.g., a journal paper) on this case. It could be interesting to hear what the doctors have to say, as opposed to what ABC News reports the poor mother has to say (projecting her wishes onto her daughter: thinking she's a rebellious teenager when really she's just an infant).
There is this girl/woman in Brazil, Maria Aldenete, who has similar syntoms. I couldn't find any info in English on her... She's 30 years old or so.
Has anyone considered that she might just be moving very close to the speed of light?
"Before the movie "50 First Dates", there was a sci-fi short story that posited this, with horrifying consequences"
It must suck that your example of this is a crappy rom-com with Adam Sandler rather than a brilliant film like Memento.
Yeah. In several hundred years she'll hit puberty. Then within a few weeks she'll develop blue-green lesions that will cover her body. She'll turn grup, meaning she'll become violent and full of rage, and then die. I saw it on TV.
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I have an aunt who was in her third trimester when she was in a car accident, and Dolly was born soon after with no apparent damage... except she never grew up. Dolly passed away a few years ago, at the age of 33, and weighed about 80 pounds - she did grow "up", but much slower than normal - she was 20 before she weighed 40 pounds, and never spoke a single intelligible word. She never matured mentally beyond around 6 months, and was always in a crib at all the family gatherings. Thankfully, I never had to change her diaper.
There are some differences, as Dolly did seem to physically mature, just very slowly - but the doctors didn't seem to think it was that phenomenal, just brain damage from the accident. She did have the same odd development that Megan's eyes have - the wandering eye, so to speak. (As opposed to my wandering eye, which is entirely a different sort of affliction.) :)
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Her lack of mental development could be directly related to her lack of physical development, in that her brain is not physically developing to be able to learn and process information like everyone else's does. I'm by no means a doctor but I thought I'd throw that out there as a reasonable hypothesis.
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perhaps a large conglomerate could claim intellectual property on this mutation, and mass produce cute little baby pets that never grow up and become surly teenagers. perhaps you could even clone yourself, and have a little pet baby you to waddle around in diapers and make cute cooing noises. when the novelty wears off and they become a hassle, just leave them by the side of the road, like people always do with golden retriever puppies at the end of the summer and such*
*this post brought to you in an attempt to offend every shred of ethics you have
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In a couple of years, when she turns 18, would nudes of her be child porn? Eh?
(listens for the sounds of heads exploding)
-Styopa
> So she's Wolverine?
But maybe with her "normal" growth is considered damage and thus "fixed".
Just like the brain tumour that appeared and vanished, any parts that try to go "next stage" get repaired.
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The 'child' is a primordial dwarf. Her symptoms fit to the last detail.
This story has done time on Digg and Fark already, probably several other sites as well, and it seems everywhere large numbers of non-doctors can use Google to compare her symptoms to a RARE but known medical condition. The poor kid's doctors either don't know how to research or are otherwise incompetent.
Or maybe, just a wild thought here, maybe they have a slightly better insight into her symptoms, having actually examined her and seen her test results, and they have already ruled that out for reasons which your cursory diagnosis, based on reading an ABCnews article and several minutes of medical training, missed.
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(scowl... limp... vicodin chomp)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Episode Eight, season four the solution ended up being Lupus.
Why isn't there an "insensitive" mod point?
Would that be +1 or -1 ?