Don't Ignore that Headache, This Guy Had a Tapeworm in His Brain

A UK man has a very rare secret hiding in his brain and it has been causing him problems for more than four years.

Photo Credit: Sanger Institute

The 50 year old man complained of headaches and a strange smell but doctors could not figure out what the problem was. That was until they took an MRI of his brain and discovered a tape worm. According to doctors at the Sanger Institute the parasite lived in the man’s brain for four years and over the course of that time it moved five centimetres from the right side to the left side of his brain.

Photo Credit: Sanger Institute

The one centimetre long tapeworm was removed from the man’s brain and the patient is said to be doing well in recovery.

"The clinical histology slide offered us a great opportunity to generate the first genome sequence of this elusive class of tapeworms," said Dr Hayley Bennett, first author of the study from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "However, we only had a minute amount of DNA available to work with - just 40 billionths of a gram. So we had to make difficult decisions as to what we wanted to find out from the DNA we had."

Photo Credit: Sanger Institute

To identify the exact species of worm, the researchers sequenced one particular gene, the so-called 'barcode of life'. Fortunately for the patient, the gene's DNA sequence revealed that the parasite was the more benign of the two sparganosis-causing worm species.

Photo Credit: Sanger Institute

"We did not expect to see an infection of this kind in the UK, but global travel means that unfamiliar parasites do sometimes appear," says Dr Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas, study author from the Department of Infectious Disease, Addenbrooke's NHS Trust. "We can now diagnose sparganosis using MRI scans, but this does not give us the information we need to identify the exact tapeworm species and its vulnerabilities. Our work shows that, even with only tiny amounts of DNA from clinical samples, we can find out all we need to identify and characterise the parasite."

Photo Credit: Sanger Institute

Since 1953 there have been only 300 reports of the tapeworm, Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, but it has never before been seen in the United Kingdom. The worm causes sparganosis: inflammation of the body's tissues in response to the parasite. When this occurs in the brain, it can cause seizures, memory loss and headaches. It is thought that people may be infected by accidently consuming tiny infected crustaceans from lakes, eating raw meat from reptiles and amphibians, or by using a raw frog poultice - a Chinese remedy to calm sore eyes.