3-inch live worm found in Australian woman's brain

2023-08-29 15:24:45

August 29, 2023

This 64-year-old woman spent more than a year and a half with this 8 centimeter larva lodged in her frontal lobe. Memory, respiratory, blood disorders, the many symptoms of the patient are finally explained.

His case was the subject of an article published in the scientific journal Energing Infectious Diseases. A 64-year-old Australian woman was admitted to hospital after three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhea, coughing and night sweats. It was only after an ordeal of several months that the doctors removed from his brain, during a biopsy, a roundworm, a nematode “alive and moving” usually parasitic on Australian pythons.

During this long period, the patient was treated for community-acquired pneumonia, then for eosinophilic pneumonia – eosinophilia being a blood disorder – but the cause of which remained unexplained. On CT, she showed lesions in the lungs, liver and spleen (relating to the spleen). The sexagenarian also suffered for several months from memory loss and worsening depression despite treatment.

“A wire-like structure”

It was during an MRI of the brain that a lesion was discovered in the right frontal lobe. During the biopsy, the doctors discover a living “larval form” 8 cm long“a thread-like structure” within the lesion, which they removed. “When I saw it moving, I thought, ‘Get it out of my hands now!’ We all felt a wave of nausea and put the thing in a jar where it quickly squirmed and tried to escape,” tells the Australian media ABC Australia the neurosurgeon Hari Priya Bandi, co-author of the article. It was then clearly established that it was an Ophidascaris robertsi nematode via DNA sequencing.

In a world first, doctors have extracted a living roundworm from a patient’s brain. Usually found in carpet pythons, the infection may have come from eating contaminated native greens (via @ABCscience)

— ABC Australia (@ABCaustralia) August 29, 2023

Parasite of the carpet python, how could the nematode grow in the frontal lobe of this Australian? According to the doctors, while residing in an area where this type of snake lives, the sexagenarian could have consumed one of the eggs of O. robertsi, directly through edible plants or through his hands or kitchen equipment. “The clinical and radiological evolution of the patient suggests a dynamic process of migration of the larvae to multiple organs, accompanied by eosinophilia in the blood and tissues, revealing a visceral syndrome of larva migrans », explains the article. He further specifies that while visceral involvement is common in animals, this is the first time that the invasion of a brain by larvae has been observed.

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Source : Human neural larva migrans caused by Ophidascaris robertsi Ascarid, Emerging infectious Diseases, Septembre 2023 – ABC Australia
Written by : Dorothée Duchemin – Edited by: Vincent Roche