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An infectious disease doctor has revealed that a patient who was found to have an 8cm-long worm squirming around her brain most likely had other larvae ‘running’ inside her.
The 64-year-old woman from southeast New South Wales recently became the first human to have a worm removed from her brain.
She was admitted to a local hospital in 2021 after suffering for three weeks with diarrhea and abdominal pain, a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.
She became depressed and forgetful before a neurosurgeon at Canberra Hospital discovered an abnormality in the right frontal lobe of her brain during an MRI scan in June 2022.
When doctors performed brain surgery to investigate, they found the 8cm Ophidascaris robertsi roundworm, which scientists say was the first to be found in a human.
The parasitic worm is only found in the intestines of carpet pythons. The woman is believed to have eaten the worm’s eggs by eating native war greens, which may have been contaminated with the droppings of a python.
After hatching in her body, the larvae reached her brain, which doctors suspect was due to drugs she was taking that compromised her immune system.
Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease expert at Canberra Hospital, received a call from his colleague after the worm was found.
Doctors were shocked to extract a live, wriggling 8cm parasitic worm from the 64-year-old’s brain.
“They said ‘you’ll never guess what they just found – an 8cm worm alive and wiggling so you’ll definitely have to get involved,’” he told Daily Mail Australia.
“We spent the next 16 hours trying to figure out what it could have been.”
Dr. Senanayake and his colleagues scoured school textbooks to try to determine what type of roundworm had made its way through his body.
They sent the worm to a scientist in the CSIRO lab with experience in parasites, who was able to determine that the worm was a Ophidascaris robertsi.
The doctor said that the parasites have the ability to multiply and spread.
“This patient almost certainly had several,” he said, adding that she wouldn’t have felt a quivering sensation.
“She had stomach pains, coughing and spots on her lungs and liver.
“In retrospect, they were probably small larvae that traveled and ran – but they certainly would have been smaller (than the 8cm worm).”
Doctors performed scans of the woman’s brain after she reported that she had become forgetful and increasingly depressed and they identified a lesion on the left side of the organ (white spot) worth investigating .
The expert said it was unclear what might have happened to this woman had the worm not been found, given that this is the first reported human case.
He explained that the parasites do not wish to kill their hosts because they depend on their bodies to live.
“Obviously there’s this ‘yuck’ factor. We’re all somewhat horrified at the thought of that, so you can imagine how she felt,” Dr Senanayake said.
“What I tell doctors is: you want to be the most boring patient in the world.
“Being a patient and being the first in the world to have anything is something you don’t want.”
Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease doctor at Canberra Hospital, said it was likely other larvae were ‘running’ through her in the woman.
The 64-year-old was sent home shortly after having surgery and is recovering well.
Dr Senanayake said doctors were monitoring the woman who did not need to return to hospital since the worm was removed.
“She was very patient and brave,” he said, adding that she was sent home with four weeks of parasite treatment.
Although it is too difficult to know how long the worm could have remained in the woman’s brain, Dr Senanayake said this type of larva has been known to live inside small mammals like rodents for four years.
Dr Hari Priya Bandi was operating on the woman when she felt something ‘completely abnormal’ in the area of the brain where the MRI had shown growth.
She then pulled out a “linear object.”
“I immediately thought it was some kind of wire, but then realized it was moving,” she told the newspaper. ABC.
“We all felt a wave of nausea and put the thing in a jar where it squirmed quickly and tried to escape.”
Dr Bandi said the next thing she and her colleagues did was call infectious disease doctors to figure out the next step.
Dr. Senanayake and Dr. Bandi published their findings in a report in the newspaper Emerging infectious diseases.
Over the past 30 years, 30 infections have emerged, three-quarters of which can be transmitted from animals to humans.
“Humans encroach on animal habitats, we interact with domestic animals, wild animals and vegetation,” he said.
“There are more possibilities for these types of infections to occur.”
The researchers who worked on this discovery are from the Australian National University, Canberra Health Services, CSIRO, University of Melbourne and University of Sydney.