Brainless civil servant amazes doctors
Frenchman's skull a 'huge fluid-filled chamber'
A French man whose skull was mostly occupied by a
"huge fluid-filled chamber" was able to operate perfectly well as a
civil servant - despite having "little more than a thin sheet of actual
brain tissue", Reuters reports.
The 44-year-old's condition was revealed when he went to hospital
suffering from mild weakness in his left leg. A probe of his medical
history revealed he'd had a shunt inserted into his skull as an infant
to relieve hydrocephalus, which was removed when he was 14.
Doctors were "amazed" when computed tomography and magnetic
resonance imaging scans showed "massive enlargement" of his lateral
ventricles, "usually tiny chambers that hold the cerebrospinal fluid
that cushions the brain".
Dr Lionel Feuillet and colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille explained in a letter to The Lancet:
"He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil
servant." Tests revealed the chap's IQ as 75, below average but
evidently no impediment to leading a normal life.
Dr Max Muenke, a paediatric brain defect specialist at the National
Human Genome Research Institute, said: "What I find amazing to this day
is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be
compatible with life. If something happens very slowly over quite some
time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up
functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the
side." ®
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