A woman, suffering from depression and forgetfulness, has had an 8cm-long parasitic live roundworm removed from her brain.
The 64-year-old of age resident of New South Wales in Australia was referred to the hospital in January 2021 after three weeks of diarrhoea and abdominal pain followed by night sweats and dry cough.
In 2022 her symptoms, including depression and forgetfulness, increased with medical professionals referring her to Canberra Hospital.
During an MRI scan of her brain, it was revealed that a living parasite, motilehelminth, was embedded in the right frontal lobe lesion of her brain, the first such instance seen in the world.
Surgical intervention was deemed necessary. After that, doctors successfully removed the 8 cm (80mm) long 1mm wide worm from her brain.
The parasite was identified as a third-stage larva of the Ophidascaris Roberts nematode species.
Usually, this species lives in the digestive tract of pythons, indigenous to New South Wales in Australia. This is the first-ever discovery of that type of parasite in the human brain.
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According to medical professionals, the lady may have inadvertently eaten the worm’s eggs while eating edible grass. They suspect that eggs may have hatched in her body and then larvae made their way to her brain.
They also believe that the larvae may be affected by the medication that she was taking. However, the actual cause of the case is still not confirmed.
