Doctors Baffled, Intrigued By Girl Who Doesn't Age 599
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."
The Fountain of Youth. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Be Careful what you wish for! (Score:2, Interesting)
This has all the markings of a fable where someone wishes to never get old. It is a very curious case indeed though. I wonder what the cause of diminished mental capacity might be?
She looks retarded ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Similar story (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
the answer is in the abc article (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:5, Interesting)
It just struck me reading that... it must really, REALLY suck being the first person to ever have a particular disease.
What if we have it backwards?
What if she is the first person not to have the disease we all have and that she is aging but really really slow?
So in 100 years she will have the body of an 18 year old?!
I mean if you think about it, old age is a disease.
Re:Be Careful what you wish for! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
HGH Receptors (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:4, Interesting)
It just struck me reading that... it must really, REALLY suck being the first person to ever have a particular disease.
What if we have it backwards?
What if she is the first person not to have the disease we all have and that she is aging but really really slow?
So in 100 years she will have the body of an 18 year old?!
If she currently has the intellect of a four year old, then I am not too optimistic about her ever living a normal life.
Another case (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't remember their family name but it was named after her older brother, and she had it too. AFAIK, she and her brother are the only 2 documented cases of the disorder. They both had severe scoliosis, a lot of pain, some immune system disorders, and their abdomens were very short when compaired to the rest of their bodies (due to the scoliosis of the spine I assume). Having a disease named after their family was definitely not any sort of consolation either. She graduated first in her class, so it probably won't interfere with the rest of her life. She'll probably just have to explain about it to everyone she meets, and have some medical complications as she gets older and decides whether or not to have kids.
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen this before, sorta... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.) :)
Mental development... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:2, Interesting)
If the telomeres in fast-dividing cells are staying long, then she really will live for ever.
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:She looks retarded ... (Score:3, Interesting)
The family's situation is totally screwed up. If nothing changes, at least one of the kids is going to be stuck baby-sitting for the rest of their lives, putting their own life on hold, after the parents kick the bucket. This isn't fair to them. Worse - what if the genetic defect is 50/50, and the kids are carriers?
This is not a blessing - it's a horror show. Imagine dying of old age and never having become self-aware ... you can imagine it because your ARE self-aware. Emily never will be. That's the difference between a human being, and a human animal. You're a being, a person - Emily is just a human animal. Not a being, and with no capacity to become one, since she can't learn, and is responding purely on instinct. The family has developed coping mechanisms, but they'll be ill served by them in the long run. Think about what's going to happen over the next few decades. Would YOU like to have a sister as a pet, along with the responsibility that goes with it? And the guilt when you get fed up? Because that's the future in this case, unless and until Emily kicks off.
Sure, be sympathetic for the family ... but also look at the reality - that for too long we've held euthanasia as being "unthinkable", a taboo, and that we then force other people to live lives that suck because of our taboos. Sometimes, you have to be brutal to overcome a deeply-seated taboo and get people to even consider the alternatives. Or to realize that form is not more important than function. Emily might have the form of a human being, but she will never function as one - one of the essentials - changes in the brain that allow learning - is missing. The same thing that excites doctors about the rest of her has sealed her fate in that most important area - the ability to become self-aware.
I wouldn't wish this on family. But I would make it easy and socially acceptable for them to change it.
Now let me get my asbestos overcoat before the fundies go all snakey.
OK, you 'for the children' obsessives... (Score:5, Interesting)
In a couple of years, when she turns 18, would nudes of her be child porn? Eh?
(listens for the sounds of heads exploding)
Not quite wolverine (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:4, Interesting)
Meh, she'd still accumulate cellular damage and die of cancer eventually. Heart disease would also still be a possibility.
She'd probably die at 85 of pancreatic cancer or something, but look good doing it.
I think if you look carefully at the photos you can see signs of aging. She is aging, just not developing. The two are very different. Look, in particular, at the lines descending from her nose to around her mouth. As an infant, these lines are not apparent; as we get older they become more pronounced. For Brooke, these lines seem to be developing at about the same rate as her siblings, becoming apparent in the last two photos especially, suggesting that she is aging like them, but has not developed at all. This, in turn, would indicate a hormonal issue, as posited by another reply in this thread.
My speculation is that when she turns 30, Brooke will look like a 30 year old in the shape of a baby, except her skin will be somewhat less damaged since she spends most of her time inside.
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:5, Interesting)
But I think we *have* created an environment that does, by building such intricate communities and engaging so heavily in health care and stuff. There are very, very, very few animals that have longer average lifespans than humans. (Sharks, tortoises, and possibly some parrots, are the only ones that come to mind, and I *believe* those are mostly because those are animals that have little predation in their natural environments, so they have less need to reproduce as quickly as possible.)
One thing about evolution that isn't well-understood by the world at large, is that it has to work with what it currently has. Humans aren't likely to develop the ability to see electric fields any time soon, because there's no existing framework. We have trillions of generations of ancestors focussed on reproducing quickly because they lived in environments where that was favored. It's difficult to find a path that diverges from such a strong existing trend: there's very little to work with.
Plus, there are a number of different aging mechanisms. It's a weakest-link-of-the-chain sort of situation. The mechanisms tend to all equilibrate at one general area, as a result of neutral genetic drift (if one aging mechanism tends to kill people at 90 and another at 140, the one at 140 has nothing pushing it to stay there so it can drift down to 90 without affecting anything; over time it will probably tend to do this. Repeat with a half-dozen mechanisms that seem to be indicated in aging.)
Which is all a very long way of saying that I'm guessing we're in an ecological niche that does select for longer lifespans, and we're seeing the results of it, but our genes don't give evolution a lot of material to work with so we might not get much more than we currently have.
does hgh play a role in brain development? (Score:3, Interesting)
i mean superficially, the answer is definitely no. but perhaps at some other level of early development it does
or, alternately, maybe her mutation is in some previously unknown, deeper biological pathway. a deep growth superswitch pathway that controls HGH reception/release AND whatever governs brain development
Re:the answer is in the abc article (Score:4, Interesting)
exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
the mutation would be not in the HGH pathway, but in some pathway ABOVE the HGH pathway that governs the HGH pathway and a bunch of other growth pathways, like brain development. some deeper aspect of growth initiation, some sort of growth "superswitch" this girl has given us unique insight into
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally think it's low humidity, lower oxygen pressure (reducing oxidative damage) and in part selection: people who are sickly don't stay in high-altitude areas because they generally have less specialist medical care. I grew up in one of those little mountain towns in Colorado and older people said "it's hard to breathe: I'm moving to Florida" where they died.
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:3, Interesting)
This oxidation/cellular damage is coming under major dispute at this point. So don't quote it as fact, long lives whales and turtles are living evidence, trees can live to 5000 years and clams can live to 400.
Re:I don't have anything really smart to say (Score:3, Interesting)
The oldest tree, at the time it was cut down, was over 6000 years old. They've found grey whales with harpoon tips in them that hadn't been made by hunters for at least the past 400 years. There were stories of a multi-centurian lobster that was freed a while back by a restaurant. Nobody is quite sure about the aging process, other than being sure we do not really understand it.