Doctors remove tapeworm from man’s brain: ‘It was life-threatening’
A Texas brain surgeon successfully removed a tapeworm from a man’s brain after the patient reported severe headaches.
Neurosurgeon Jordan Amadio, MD, of Ascension Medical Group in Austin, conducted the May surgery on Gerardo Moctezuma, an otherwise healthy man from Mexico, who had been living in the United States for more than a decade. The patient had worsening headaches, and after he collapsed at a soccer game, he was hospitalized.
With brain scans, doctors detected a suspicious lesion (a “grape-like group of cysts”) near the man’s brainstem along with hydrocephalus, which is pressure inside the skull.
“It was a life-threatening surgical emergency due to the location,” Amadio tells Yahoo Lifestyle.
Moctezuma had neurocysticercosis, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls a parasitic infection caused by larval cysts of the pork tapeworm that reaches the brain or spinal cord. (When the infection travels to other areas of the body, it’s known as cysticercosis).
This is how a person can become infected, according to the CDC: “For example, a person eats undercooked, infected pork and gets a tapeworm infection in the intestines. She passes tapeworm eggs in her feces. If she doesn’t wash her hands properly after using the bathroom, she may contaminate food or surfaces with feces containing these eggs. These eggs may be swallowed by another person if they eat contaminated food. Once inside the body, the eggs hatch and become larvae that find their way to the brain. These larvae cause neurocysticercosis.”
Amadio tells Yahoo Lifestyle that years ago, doctors found a tapeworm in the brain of Moctezuma’s sister. “That suggests there could have been some local exposure,” he says.
The infection, which Amadio says is preventable and often curable, results in about 1,000 hospitalizations per year in the United States but only a small percentage require surgery. “Sometimes the immune system can clear the infections on their own,” he says. “Otherwise, they can go unrecognized for years.”
After a three-hour surgery, Amadio removed the tapeworm in its entirety and prescribed Moctezuma medication to kill off any remaining cells, he says. “It’s been nearly a year and the patient is disease-free.”
Amadio says the disease is common in developing countries with poor sanitation and unregulated pork practices. And though humans are hosts and pigs are intermediate hosts, anyone could become infected with cysticercosis or neurocysticercosis. What’s important, says Amadio, is that “the eggs that are transmitted in human feces in improper food preparation. The type of food doesn’t matter.”
“The best prevention strategy is the universal use of hygiene,” Amadio tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Making sure food is cooked properly, avoid undercooked meats and wash your hands — the simplest and most important way to prevent infection.”
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