trapped in a child’s body
The girls who stopped ageing when they were toddlers
LOCKED IN TIME
Zeng Yushan is 20, but has the appearance and mental capacity of a small child. She was born in June 1994 in Huzhu township, Fushun County, in the Chinese province of Sichuan. At seven years old, she stopped growing and was diagnosed with a tumour on her pituitary gland, which caused a deficiency in growth hormones. Pituitary tumours in childhood are very rare; less than one in 1,000.
Zeng’s parents couldn’t afford to pay for treatment and argued bitterly about the disease before divorcing, leaving Zeng with her father Yul Wei, 43, who subsequently fell seriously ill. Unable to pay their bills, the pair ended up on the streets begging, travelling from their home to the cities of Zigong, Chengdu and Guiyang. In 2013, Zeng’s father died from gastric cancer, leaving her alone. A warmhearted couple then spotted her begging and agreed to take her in. Guo Liu, 50, said that when they first saw her, he and his wife were unsure if she was a boy or girl because she had no hair, and had suffered horrific physical problems because of her medical condition. Mr Guo said that after the Spring Festival they planned to take Zeng to a specialist in Beijing for hormone treatment. D.Mail, 9 Feb 2015.
Ajifa Khatun was healthy when she was born in May 1994, but stopped growing before her second birthday and now, at the age of 20, weighs just 17lb (7.7kg). Her only words are ‘maa’ (mother), ‘baba’ (father) and ‘didi’ (sister), and she spends her days playing with the local children in Mirapara, West Bengal. She has witnessed her three siblings grow up around her but still has to be spoon-fed by her mother Apila, 42, who said: “She’s like a two-yearold, she can only take a few baby steps. I carry her everywhere.” Ajifa is probably suffering from a rare autosomal recessive disorder called Laron syndrome, or Laron-type dwarfism. This was first described in 1966 and only 300 cases have been recorded, often affecting people of Semitic ethnicity, although a third of the victims live in Ecuador’s southern Loja province. Those with the condition lack a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1). They are insensitive to growth hormone but also immune to diabetes and cancer. Some physical anthropologists have proposed that Homo floresiensis (discovered in Indonesia in 2003 and nicknamed ‘hobbit’ – FT191:45) represented a population with widespread Laron syndrome. Sun, 28 Jan; D.Mail, 29 Jan 2014.
A couple spotted Zeng begging and took her in
PARALYSIS PUZZLE
Since August, more than 100 children across in 34 US states have developed a mysterious, sudden paralysis. There is currently no cure, but their syndrome at least has a name: Acute Flaccid Myelitis. Victims have unexplained lesions in the spinal column. The kids have a median age of eight, and threequarters of them were previously perfectly healthy. For most, the loss of feeling occurred only on one side of the body and coincided with a nasty cold, which made health workers initially think that the paralysis was caused by a rare virus called enterovirus D68. EV-D68 is a severe respiratory virus that was going around at the start of school last year, and
because it’s a relative of polio, it was thought to be causing the polio-like loss of muscle function. Now, however, researchers aren’t sure. Of the 71 paralysed children whose cerebrospinal fluid was tested, none came back positive for enterovirus. The virus has been found in nasal swabs taken from some of the paralysed children, but that doesn’t indicate as strong a link as spinal fluid would have.
In Oregon, two girls have fallen victim: seven-year-old McKenzie Andersen is in hospital in Portland, paralysed from the neck down, while eight-year-old Bailey Sheehan, discharged from hospital in December, is hobbling around with a brace. Researchers in Colorado are currently attempting to determine whether the children suffering from paralysis have elevated levels of enterovirus 68 antibodies.
Mary Anne Jackson, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Mercy Hospital and one of the first doctors to recognise enterovirus D68, said her hospital has had three cases of paralysis. None of the paralysed kids had enterovirus D68, however, and none of the hospital’s 300 patients who had confirmed enterovirus D68 later became paralysed. “Right now we have two scenarios and we have no idea how they’re related,” said Jackson. Nationally, only one of the paralysed children has fully recovered, while about twothirds have got slightly better. Treatment is supportive, just like polio, which was eradicated in the United States in 1979 thanks to a nationwide vaccination programme. The Oregonian, 23 Jan; theatlantic.com, 10 Feb 2015.