Dead Tapeworms in the Brain Cause Seizures for a Person

Dead Tapeworms in the Brain Cause Seizures for a Person
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The sudden uncontrolled electrical disturbance in the brain, also known as a seizure, is not our idea of fun. Such experiences are indeed awful, but finding out the cause can be even more frightening sometimes.

Gizmodo.com tells us about the case of a 38-year-old man who found out that dead tapeworm cysts that were present in his brain for decades were causing him to go through seizures.

Infestation with neurocysticercosis

The man in question fell off his bed one night at 4 a.m., and the next traumatizing experience was for him to shake and speak gibberish. He manifested a combative and disoriented behavior when the emergency medical services and police arrived. The man even refused to hop into the ambulance at first. He experienced a seizure that lasted for two minutes on his way to the emergency room.

The person in question didn’t have any underlying health conditions, either. After the doctors ran CT and MRI scans on his brain, they concluded that long-since-dead and calcified larval tapeworm cysts were causing the health problems. Neurocysticercosis was to blame, to be more precise, meaning a rare infestation with the Taenia solium, meaning the pork tapeworm.

As LiveScience.com tells us, the man was treated by the doctors using anti-inflammatory and antiparasitic drugs, and after five days, he was able to leave the hospital.

Dr. Edward Ryan, who is Massachusetts General Hospital’s director of global infectious diseases, declared as quoted by LiveScience.com:

He seems to be doing fine,

The good news is he continues to do well and be seizure-free.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), neurocysticercosis is one of the parasitic infections that are caused by larval cysts, meaning enclosed sacs that contain a parasite in an immature stage, of the pork tapeworm.

 


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Even since he was a child, Cristian was staring curiously at the stars, wondering about the Universe and our place in it. Today he's seeing his dream come true by writing about the latest news in astronomy. Cristian is also glad to be covering health and other science topics, having significant experience in writing about such fields.

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