An 18-year-old man went to the emergency room for seizures, but what he found was his brain was infected with parasites.
A case study in the New England Journal of Medicine says the patient was having tonic-clonic seizures and had swelling over his right eye when he appeared in the ER in India.
The patient’s parents said their son had been having groin pain for a week and an exam showed there was tenderness in his right testis. The patient was also confused, according to Drs. Nishanth Dev and S. Zafar Abbas of the ESIC Medical College and Hospital in Faridabad.
The patient’s MRI scan showed the patient’s cerebral cortex and brain stem were damaged by cysts.
The diagnosis
The doctors diagnosed him with neurocysticercosis or an infection caused by tapeworm larvae.
Medically speaking, neurocysticercosis is a parasitic disease of the brain caused when someone swallows tapeworm eggs that have passed in the feces of someone who has an intestinal tapeworm. Then the larvae crawl out of the eggs and into muscle and brain tissues, where they form cysts, the case study says.
The patient also had cysts in his right eye and testis, the doctors said.
The doctors decided against treating the teen with antiparasitic medications because they can make brain bleeding worse. Instead, the case study said the patient was given an anti-inflammatory drug and antiepileptic medications.
The doctors said the patient died two weeks after he got to the ER.
Where does this happen?
Cysticercosis infections can happen anywhere in the world.
The majority of these infections happen in rural areas of developing countries where there are poor sanitation practices and pigs are allowed to wander freely, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC says that even though it’s rare, people can contract cysticercosis if they’ve never left the United States if they’re exposed to tapeworm eggs.
What you should watch for
The CDC says the symptoms caused by the cysts depend on a few things, such as the size, location, number and stage of the cysts.
Symptoms can include headaches, seizures, confusion, difficulty with balance, brain swelling, and excess fluid around the brain.
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