Tapeworm from a man's brain operated on

Parasite lived in the brain of a man for four years

21/11/2014

It started with headaches, memory flashbacks, and a strangely altered sense of smell, ending with an operation that removed an approximately one-centimeter long and extremely rare tapeworm from the brain of a 50-year-old man. The tapeworm lived four years in the head of the patient and is according to the genome research institute „Wellcome Trust Sanger“ It hiked about five centimeters from the right to the left hemisphere.

Insights from the genome of the tapeworm in the brain of the man open up new therapeutic options
As the institute further informs, infection of humans by the tapeworm Spirometra erinacei-europaei is very rare. In those affected can develop a so-called Sparganose, an inflammation of body tissue. When the brain is affected, patients often suffer from severe headaches, seizures and memory loss. People come into contact with tapeworm larvae only by eating contaminated crab meat, raw frog or snake meat, and frog envelopes used in China to treat ophthalmia.

For the first time, the genome of this rare tapeworm was sequenced by the discovery in the brain of the 50-year-old, which opens up new possibilities for the diagnosis and treatment of this invasive parasite. „We only had a tiny amount of DNA to work with - just 40 billionths of a gram. So we were forced to make difficult decisions about what information we wanted to extract exactly from the DNA, "said Hayley Bennett, first author of the study from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Rare tapeworm could be determined using tiny DNA samples
„We never expected to encounter such an infection in the UK, but in the face of travel around the world, unusual parasites can also appear here, "said Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas of the Cambridge University Hospital. „We can diagnose sparganosis by MRI, but this does not give us the information we need to identify the exact tapeworm species and their vulnerabilities. Our work shows that even with minute amounts of DNA from clinical samples, we can find out everything we need to identify and characterize the parasite.“ (Ag)