Brooke Greenberg of Reisterstown, Maryland, has baffled the medical world because of her mysterious condition. Brooke, who just turned seventeen last January, still has the physical appearance and mental capacity of a toddler. She is just 30 inches (76 cm) tall and weighs around 16 pounds (7.3 kg) and her mental age is estimated to be about the same as a 9 to 12 month-old child. She also hasn’t learned to speak yet. Scientists, who have termed Brooke’s condition Syndrome X, believe that her abnormality is caused by a defect in the genes that control her body’s aging. “There’ve been very minimal changes in Brooke’s brain … Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected,” said Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, of Brooke’s aging process. However, scientists see Brooke’s condition as an opportunity for them to study the mysterious process of aging. Walker, who has already published a paper on Brooke’s disorder, said, “Our hypothesis is that she is suffering from damage in the gene or genes that coordinate the way the body develops and age. If we can use her DNA to find that mutant gene then we can test it in laboratory animals to see if we can switch if off and slow down the aging process at will. Just possibly it could give us an opportunity to answer the question of why we are mortal.”
Interesting Fact: When specialists began decoding Brooke’s DNA sequence, they found out that certain genes associated with DNA repair were normal. Mutated copies of those genes are thought to be responsible for ‘rapid aging’ disorders like progeria and Werner syndrome.
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