Neurosurgeon removes live worm from woman's brain in world-first discovery | DW News

In a

world

first

, a

neurosurgeon

in Australia removed a

worm

found a

live

in a

woman

's

brain

. The creature measured around eight centimeters or three inches and is understood to be the larva of a round

worm

native to Australia that was not previously known to be a human parasite. Discovered during a biopsy operation last summer, details of the shock finding have been revealed in a new paper published by experts involving the 64-year-old patient having been admitted to hospital. After experiencing forgetfulness and worsening depression for three months, we can now speak to the

neurosurgeon

at Canberra Hospital who discovered that worm Dr.

Hari Priya bandi welcome to DW Dr. bunny before addressing the meaning of the worm. First I would like to ask you to simply tell us about the moment of the

discovery

of a shark. I absolutely understand, um, neurosurgery is exceptionally planned requires imaging beforehand, very rarely do we find something that we didn't expect to find and during this case where we did an open biopsy of the skull, we opened up the normal tissues that we had, like we usually do , we find abnormal. The

brain

looked a little discolored. My junior doctor had taken some samples smaller than a few millimeters and they didn't look particularly abnormal, but this poor

woman

had been suffering for so long and I thought it was really important to give her an answer.

We followed the stereotactic map that we had created beforehand and we were able to dissect using fine dissectors where the abnormality was on the MRI beforehand and we did that and found out, oh gosh, it's behaving like a tumor, whatever it is, and then I used corsets that support tumors. and I pulled out something that was definitely not what I expected, a scribbled linear line, um, and my junior doctor said it's an artery because that's what it looked like, but I said it's not an artery, we're not close to any arteries and I noticed which was I moved and immediately went, please just take it out of my forceps, God, just take it out of the forceps, so we quickly put it in a pathology pot and the worm was moving vigorously.

Can I see that you have a model of the brand in your hand? just hold it up a little higher and point to where you found that worm in the brain. Yeah, sorry, this is just a rudimentary model of the skull and basically this lesion that this lady had found on the right side, so her story was many months earlier. and in fact almost a year before he had lesions on his tongue and

live

r, many tests found nothing and finally he had these symptoms and this is where we did a biopsy through his skull using this fine surgery where now you can locate this parasitic worm what did you find. usually found in snakes, how did it end up in this woman's brain?

So this lady lives on the coast, um, on the southeast coast of Australia and she lives around a region where the lakes are where there is a green material called warragul grass or green warragul very similar to spinach and she normally picks it, the prepares them properly, washes them and boils them and cooks them in their normal cooking and we suspect that that could be the source where this comes in because when we found this worm it was red writhing and a veterinarian The scientist who saw the image of the worm immediately said that it was a python worm because it was a nematode.

It's bright red and has a very distinctive feature, so we tracked it down. Carpet snakes are very endemic to that area and travel over these green war grasses. and it probably deposited some feces in these grasses, this worm has been described among snakes as feces and inside mammals and small rodents and that is the normal life cycle that you give a human, so you found it in the brain, you described how to remove it with your forceps, can we? Let's assume that the worm had moved through the brain, yes we can and we have images of that, so what happened was initially I had a lot of lung symptoms, liver symptoms, abdominal pains, but then it progressed early last year to have more depressive symptoms.

She simply didn't feel like herself at all and felt out of control, very frontal, one might say, so the psychiatrist, before intensifying her treatment, decided to do a CT scan. On the CT scan you can clearly see something on the surface of the right frontal brain. her non-dominant lower back because she is a right-handed woman and on that surface the CT scan initially, her next MRI showed it was changing. The subsequent MRI that was part of our planning showed that it was changing and moving, so this was changing and moving, but only in retrospect, can you see?

Oh, you can see that little squiggle of a line that we can now appreciate as a word because there are no medical images that show us anything similar, so it's easy in hindsight and finally, what about the patient? I know you described her saying that she had had symptoms of forgetfulness, depression, uh, how is the patient doing? After suffering from this long illness without answers and without improvement, I was very happy to have an answer, to have a diagnosis, but the most important thing is that not only a diagnosis, but now potential treatments, so we have been able to cure her of this parasite while not described in humans.

Certainly, parasite treatments of this nature have been around for a long time and fantastic. The Canberra Infectious Hospital team uses doctors, haematologists, immunologists, they all came together and were able to provide her with a suitable regimen and she is doing well on imaging. Now we can't see in the brain any progression of other lesions in other parts of the lung, the liver lesions. everything is calming down, so it's okay after this horrible time that has happened, it's very good to hear you, so you are a scientist, you are a neurosurgeon, so of course you approached us from a scientific point of view, but I want to ask you.

You're like? I don't know. Are you afraid of slippery things? Snakes and worms get under the skin so to speak. Yes, absolutely look. I'm a gardener but I'm not very good and I'm not. He likes snakes or worms. I know my six year old definitely likes them a lot and he loved this story. He is terrifying. Surgery is a very controlled environment. Neurosurgeons are in charge of monitoring. And in very predictable ways, so something in motion is eliminated. brain is horrible for me and for a while I like to lift anything with my tumor holding forceps, it caused me some stress because time has passed, retelling the story has brought it back, but um, yeah, definitely It's not what you'd expect and it isn't. something I'm used to Dr.

Hari Priya Bundy, thank you for sharing his story with us. That was Dr High Prairie Bandi, the neurosurgeon at Canberra Hospital.