Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims he lives with a dead worm in his brain, according to court documents obtained by The New York Times. Kennedy, 70, said the remains of the parasite were discovered in 2010 after he saw a neurologist for memory loss and brain fog, when he feared he had brain cancer like his late uncle, Senator Edward Mr. Kennedy. He claimed in a 2012 deposition that what at first appeared to be a tumor “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate part of it, then died.” Kennedy suspects he caught the parasite while traveling in South Asia. Speaking to The New York Times, he said he was no longer experiencing memory loss or fogginess related to the health incident, which he noted did not require treatment.
How can something like this happen? Here’s what you need to know about this disease, known as neurocysticercosis.
How does a worm get into the brain?
Kennedy’s disease can develop if you accidentally eat or drink parasite larvae, but the vast majority of the time it is caused by a certain type of tapeworm, known scientifically. Ribbon soles, Dr. Michael Wilsonneurologist specializing in infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, told Yahoo Life.
“Here’s how it can happen: a person becomes infected with a tapeworm by eating contaminated meat like pork,” explains William Sullivan, professor of pharmacology, toxicology, microbiology and immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine, told Yahoo Life. “In its intestine, the tapeworm produces tens of thousands of eggs which are then excreted in the stool. Now, if they don’t pay attention to washing their hands after using the toilet, [a person] can become infected with tapeworm eggs.
Or, the infected person’s dirty hands can contaminate food or water with tapeworm eggs. “Either way, the baby tapeworms (larvae) that emerge from the eggs are small enough to pass through the intestinal wall and form cysts in other organs, including the brain,” says Sullivan.
What are the symptoms?
“Once the tapeworm reaches the brain, it will form a cyst” — or a fluid-filled sac — “in the brain tissue and stay there,” Wilson says. “It can stay there without causing clinical symptoms for many years, and we don’t really understand why.” But eventually, “the immune system will say, ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ and attack it,” he explains.
Brain inflammation caused by attacks from the immune system results in symptoms, by far the most common of which is a epileptic crisis — and not caused by the worm itself, Wilson says. The worm larvae “reside in the brain, but it’s not like they’re eating away at it,” he adds.
A seizure is almost always the symptom that leads to the discovery of an active neurocysticercosis infection, but other effects, such as speech disturbances or cognitive impairment, are possible depending on the location and number of cysts. larvae. If a patient was…
