The Rarest Cancer on Earth: Only One Known Case
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- čas přidán 29. 05. 2022
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You've heard of Breast Cancer, Skin Cancer, Colon Cancer, and many others. But this specific cancer was something entirely different-it took a research team five months to diagnose this specific cancer case, and that’s due purely to its highly abnormal nature. Learn more about the mysterious cancer with only one known cause in this new episode of SciShow!
Hosted by: Michael Aranda
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Sources:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NB...
www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056...
www.cdc.gov/parasites/blastoc...
www.cdc.gov/dpdx/hymenolepias...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29332...
www.cdc.gov/media/releases/20...
www.cdc.gov/hiv/pdf/effective...
www.aafp.org/afp/1998/0115/p3...
www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/whatis...
Image Sources:
www.gettyimages.com/detail/ph...
www.gettyimages.com/detail/ph...
www.gettyimages.com/detail/ph...
www.gettyimages.com/detail/ph...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
www.cdc.gov/media/releases/20...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
www.cdc.gov/amd/whats-new/amd...
www.gettyimages.com/detail/ph...
www.gettyimages.com/detail/ph...
www.gettyimages.com/detail/ph...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
www.gettyimages.com/detail/ph...
www.gettyimages.com/detail/vi...
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Hey.
Do you know that lgbtq-haters run for Congress right now?
@@littleking5546 cggfdffrppx
Pathologists are doctors; pathology is a specialty in medicine. While a pathologist might be a research scientist as well, most pathologist are practicing doctors not scientists.
Uuuuuou
Bad: "I'm afraid you have cancer."
Worse: "I'm afraid you have tapeworms, and they gave you cancer."
My man had literal Canceraids
More like "I'm afraid you have tapeworms and they are cancer"
"I'm afraid your tapeworms have cancer"
It's more like sry you got hiv and gave your tape worms cancer raging cells .. it's not science.. geez..
"I'm afraid you have tapeworms and have caught cancer from them"
Doctor: Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news?
Patient: “Good new please.”
Doctor: “We’re naming a disease after you.”
..
..... .. .
......... . ............ ..... . ...
Ub..
I've learned that the worst thing my boss, a veterinarian, can say is, "Interesting."
"... Hold on, what's the difference between the good news and the bad news here?"
@@slwrabbits I see you and raise you for 'Oops...'
My grandfather has a super rare form of skin cancer, the only one in Canada. It took them a long time to figure out what it was and they brought doctors from all over the country to study him. They said he would end up in medical textbooks, and he also beat the cancer at 80 years old.
Name of cancer? I am a doctor too. I wanna know.
@@indiankid8601 Intermediate cell hystocytosis. It grew slowly (luckily) from a patch of psoriasis which he had on his upper leg for most of his life. They removed it and a large portion of tissue around it, and he can still walk since its healed.
@@MrLoobu Must be *histiocytosis. Anyways thanks. I will google and read a paper on it now.
@@indiankid8601 Glad to help, thanks for the question!
Beating cancer at 80 is an extraordinary feat! Sadly cancer doesn’t only consume your physical body it also affects your psyche and some people lose their will to live. Your grandfather must be a strong-minded person.
I had a very rare cancer when I was 4. It was a rhabdomyosarcoma, usually found in limb muscles, however it was found in my kidney and bladder. By the time it was discovered I was in stage with metastasised tumour the size of a basket ball in my pelvis. I wasn’t supposed to survive, but here I am 36 years later. I am the first survivor so there’s no one ahead of me to know what is coming
So happy for you!❤️❤️
This guy defeating a basketball sized tumor:
Me who couldn’t even defeat a sore throat:😐
A year late, but how the hell it take that long to discover a basketball sized tumor attached to your pelvis?
@@jocelynuy2922 girl*
@sssspider it didn't start that big SMH...They start small and divide rapidly until treatment...
Props to the patient to give his blessing to the doctors to publish these very rare results before dying.
Absolutely!!!
As long as they don’t use his name, say "Patient MH" or something like that, he should not be able to stop them from publishing and sharing important scientific knowledge. Especially after he’s dead! I don’t think someone can, well I know they can’t, freedom of speech. It’s nice to know the person gives their blessing but they certainly don’t need consent.
@@pearkore6821 blessing literally means consent in this scnario
@@kaltkalt2083 all the studies I have been involved with have a section that allows you to remove consent for your information to be shared. No, you can't stop them but you'd have to have a wider ethical debate around their actions without his consent.
Case happened in Colombia and rare enough it’s the only case. I doubt the patient’s consent mattered. Not like he is going to be around to file complaint
Damn… imagine having untreated HIV, tapeworms, and the rarest type of cancer in the world all at once. Poor dude. 😬
and dying of kidney failure :(
Most likely due to the HIV.
I'm actually impressed he managed to live on for 6 more months after the cancers were found, not even when they first developed. The guy's crazy strong for managing to live through all that.
Simple things like condoms, not swimming in random water bodies, cooking food properly can avoid all these avoidable disease of life. Life is wasted the moment you take wrong decisions.
...
As a med student this makes me think of how many diseases go misdiagnosed. This rare case was identified because the doctors involved took notice of how the ‘cancer cells’ are oddly smaller and they had the tools to thoroughly examine the cellular DNA which later revealed to be tapeworm canceroid cells.
But in many cases I know that either (1) doctors would just write them off as atypically small cancer cells and/or (2) the hospital wouldn’t have the facilities for any further examination.
I hope in the future we could improve our diagnostic approach and hospitals/institutions with their tools.
Usually, it's horses. Sometimes, it's zebras. Occasionally, it's a dude in chain mail armor skipping down the road with a pair of coconut shells in his hands.
Absolutely.
Fortunately DNA analysis is almost mandatory in oncology right now (at least in my country). However I agree about many diseases going misdiagnosed, I remember a patient that a I followed during my residency and who entered for what we initialy thought was a benign condition, however the patient declined over 2 months and eventually died. We checked for everything and never found what the patient had.
@@00muinamir H
@@00muinamir This is probably the best saying I've ever heard.
Sounds like a perfect storm of situations with the HIV crippling the immune system and then the person getting the tapeworm, the body spreading its egg around, them latching on and not dying for some reason and instead mutating in this weird way. No wonder it's so rare.
As someone with a phobia of worm parasites, this is pretty much terror fuel to me.
If you don't have "cancero-phobia" too, than what's the deal 🥴? 🤔😌
@@MoradorDeCalcada No, don't sleep with it, or anyone. Sleeping with people is how you get HIV, and HIV is how you get tapeworm cancer.
(I know there are other vectors for HIV, it's a joke)
@@Littleprinceleon Their phobia is with worm parasites, and this case is cancer from a worm parasite. Phobias are an unexplained heightened fear. Please understand this type of fear, and not dismiss it. It is real.
@@westzed23 What do you mean by real? Are they really experiencing heightened fear? Sure, that's why we have a word for it. Does it mean that fear is justified or rational? Absolutely not.
@@Lavasparked I was quite clear. I didn't understand his last sentence.
Imagine going to the hospital for HIV and the doctors tell you that you have tapeworm cancer
Almost like nature doesn't like sodomites and drug users.
Imagine any circumstance where the doctors tell you that you have any parasite cancer. Ew.
And then you die of kidney failure
You can get cancer from a human embryo.
@@V.Hansen. "Yep, you don't have normal cancer, you have *tapeworm* cancer"
I've made in into medical texts with my atypical endometriosis. Four surgeries including a radical hysterectomy. I've got a lesion in my breast now - that was initially diagnosed as breast cancer when I presented with bleeding.
Pretty proud to know photos and videos from my surgeries are used to teach the medical students at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Was incredibly happy to help out in such a small way.
I have endometrial tissue that traveled to lymph nodes in the back of my neck and behind my ear. I’d had a hysterectomy (but still have ovaries) and in e a month those lymph nodes swell and get pretty sensitive and painful. We refer to them as my lizard bumps.
I'm praying for both of you for your health. Thank you Quack Addict for your contribution to medicine and helping others.
Are you ok? Or is it still plaguing you
It isn’t a competition
So cool! When I was born via cesarean-section, doctors discovered that my mother had two functioning uterus’. She had no idea until the day I was born! With her permission, pictures were taken and later added to medical textbooks. It has never affected her negatively, and she was happy her unique body could contribute to science haha
The most worrying thing to me is that it isn't a "race against time" for most people with a unknown sickness... It's usually "I think you have this, so take this medicine." When it could be something completely new.
yep. and that’s only if you can afford to and/or have the time for a doctors visit. i suffer from a myriad of chronic health issues and in the 5 years of hospital visits and tests and medication changes, not a single doctor or specialist has been able to diagnose me or even point me in any conclusive direction. they all just take bloodwork and prescribe me the same 3 medications to try, and give up on me when nothing happens. doctors really don’t know as much as people think they do.
@@darkalleyvampire The sad thing is this is right. I'm no way a doctor but I like to at least check on scientific sources and reading some publicitations especially because of covid opened my eyes on how little humanity actually knows about diseases and body functions. A lot of body related stuff is "we do it because 30 years ago this seemed to have worked in trials", or "we have no idea what is going on but somehow this medicine sometimes work so we need to use it" etc. It's crazy how much medications etc. can still help despite we/scientists/doctors not knowing as much as we should. But this also depends on individual doctors, lot of them just go by the book and don't care or want to deal with problems in depth in specific things.
@@canyongoat2096 part of that is thanks to the ethics in science, the creation of a new med or study of a new disease may be a very turbulent journey
“For those with access to that care” is such an important bit of information when talking about medical treatments.
HIV medication is expensive. Effective, but expensive.
@@AtarahDerek It wasn't always expensive (it's relatively inexpensive to make). It's expensive nowadays because of price gouging.
in many exploited and impoverished countries the HIV they have there is a different enough strain that even if they could access treatment it wouldn't work. southeast asia can give thanks to bayer for knowingly selling them HIV-contaminated medication, for example.
i've lost more friends and family to that bedamned virus than i have left.
@@SAOS451316 HIV is such a fragile virus that they would have to inject the aspirin directly into the veins in order for the virus to take. Eating something that might have been exposed to HIV isn't going to give you the virus.
@@AtarahDerek someone must have because that's where it was traced to. or they had an open wound and the virus got into their bloodstream that way. it only took one person getting infected to spread it. even if it didn't cause an epidemic it would be an unconscionable crime against humanity to know your medicine is contaminated with a deadly virus and sell it by the ton anyway.
I'm happy to hear you've already done a vid on Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor! An STD still present in dogs today, consisting of transmissible cancer cells of a dog who lived 2500 years ago in central asia. That dog's cells have been cloning themselves for 2500 years and are the only legacy of that dog's relatives. This genital cancer is the closest living relative to the dogs that the indigenous people of the Americas had (by percentage of DNA)!
It's also missing 17 chromosomes compared to a normal dog cell!
And that Tasmanian devil infectious cancer😳
Is this how viruses first evolved?
@@luissemedo3597 Viruses are something else entirely. Much smaller than a single cell, they look like spiders with a needle. Inside of their "butt" (if you imagine a spider) are their chromosomes, long strands which are made of DNA. When a virus latches onto a cell they stick their needle into the cell and inject their chromosomes into the cell, hijacking it and forcing the cell to make more viruses until the cell makes so much it bursts open, releasing all of the viruses.
@@luissemedo3597 No, not even slightly
Sounds pretty interesting, as is the Tasmanian devil cancer, but I think they may have done an episode on that.
Like something straight out of a House MD episode. My heart truly goes out to the patient and his family, I hope this case prevents loss in the future.
Hey.
Do you know that lgbtq-haters run for Congress right now?
Yeah agreed same
That episode still gave me terror until today 🤢
@@rzchmzI still don't know what it looks like despite watching the scene numerous times. I looks away every time.
So basically the “cancers” might have been highly mutated tapeworms that grew up constrained in the wrong environment. Now that’s proper nightmare fuel.
New fear unlocked tbh
@@youraftermyrobotbeeIf you aren't HIV+ you probably don't have to worry.
This was equal parts disgusting and fascinating.
I watched it while eating McDonald's. No ragrets.
@@minacapella8319 watched this too while eating. i'm enjoying a breakfast of noodles.
@@mayabartolabac 🤨
just like the nanjing massacre!
ik I was eating and the adult lovecraftian horror flashed on screen and I was like WHOA maybe not the greatest choice of a nice educational dinner video
so I minimized the video and kept listening (because who wants to stare at tapeworms while eating? Thing had impressive length though) to what I knew would be a really interesting case. I mean, we go from talking about tapeworms, to talking about cancer, to talking about tapeworms possibly _becoming_ cancer. Damn nature, you scary.
4:26 Welp, I saw that happening. HIV and tapeworm cancer? Sounds like an EXTREMELY rough way to go. Oh well.
His medical history goes beyond natural. He had to have suffered from a gypsy curse, gotten a magical malady, or pissed off God somehow.
@@arthas640 I thought Gypsy's only existed in Romania, not Colombia. LoL.
Pretty sure there was a diaspora because of historical persecution.
@@maruku4445 they’re everywhere now thanks to lax immigration policies
@@nicholaslewis8594 historical persecution of tapeworm cancer? What?
I guess I’m seeing this because I have a tumor in a blood vessel. It’s so rare, there’s only been 30 cases documented. I’m getting it fully excised Thursday, wish me luck!
Sending virtual hugs
You're going to be OK! Get well soon
Good luck! 🤞
good luck!
All the best! (And thank god you "have acces to that care".)
Man... It really hit me hard when he had to specify "for those with access to that care..."
That really goes to show how far we still have to go.
My friend got a case of cancer which only had 800 total cases. Some kind of bone cancer, forget what it was called. He was fine in the end, but chemo took a toll.
My mom developed an uncommon form of leukemia. CHEMO SUX. Because it kills.
Some of the Med Student - type people around here may want to look up his case, could you tell us his name or how to identify him in the medical journals?
@@TheNoiseySpectator I asked him, it's mesenchymal chondrosarcoma
@@borat1 I'm sorry if this is rude but it's hilarious trying to imagine the borat saying that
gonna find out who asked one day...
He didn't get cancer, his tapeworms did.
Great philosophical question: whose cancer was it?
hiv gave him cancer from the tape worm
they might've become cancer
tapeworm larvae can do weird stuff. People have died because they went to the brain, and this is part of why pigs get vaccinated and treated for parasites.
@@lsswappedcessna one more reason is hiv, the body didn't fight against it bcoa he had hiv,
@@Littleprinceleon The end result is the same so who cares?
To me it seems like a pointless question, like do the pubic hair of a siamese twins belong to the person on the left or the one to the right?
Rest in peace to the patient for gifting us with his permission to study this.
He's the first patient. But that's only the first one we've noticed. This particular cancer case can lend a lot of beneficial information and treatments for rare cases on the future.
"For those with access to that care"
Do your part to fight for a world where that's _everybody._
Unfortunately, my fellow, the greed of few powerful satan's doormats are too immense.
Remember, the world can accomodate so much but not a single of greed.
Healthcare systems? "Nah, let's profit off of it even if we drag everything else ever existed to hell."
@@yurishaa.9337 I mean most of the civilized world has universal healthcare, so clearly it's not impossible. The majority that recognizes why it's a good idea just has to be willing to fight for it against the tiny minority of profiteers.
It won't ever happen as long as capitalism exists.
@@DeroMan64 Most of Europe is capitalist.
They also have universal healthcare.
There's no reason we can't make it work, we just have to recognize that basic human rights shouldn't be privately capitalized.
@@wasd____ most of europe isnt capitalism.
Wow. I wonder if there's been similar non human cancers that have gone undetected? Perhaps just a general "cancer" diagnosis that wasn't investigated because they were on the verge of death anyway
A problem with humans and even the humans that practice medicine is that when they hear hooves they think Horses, not Zebras.
I have a friend with EDS who was told by not less than ten doctors over twice as many years that hypermobility is not a symptom they were going to consider.
My Father's lung cancer was scanned and biosopied for 3 years before they decided to treat it (Altoona VA, if anyone is wondering)
And any discussion forum on people with rare illnesses is going to have thousands of accounts like that, Hell my sister's Crohn's was diagnosed as depression for like 20 years till it got so bad they had to remove ten foot of small intestine.
So yeah, I suspect non human cancers in humans are far more common than we may think. Sadly for the art of medical practices is that very often there is only one set of eyes on the subject and those eyes tend to already know what they are looking for. That leads to a bias to prevents them from seeing what they do not expect to see.
Consider that all our lives, we get cancers all the time... Only for most of our lives, our immune system just kicks its ass and wipes the tumors and pustules and other growths out...
This guy had an immuno-deficiency syndrome, so his system wasn't up to the task of wiping his rando' cancerous growths out "like normal"... and the doctors were able to catch a glimpse into it on a very rare circumstance...
It' IS possible that a LOT of cancers could start very similarly... maybe it's a parasite or just a bacteria that gets out of it's normal environment... or any of thousands of other sources of "cells" that could mutate over generations and change from their origin to a new "colony" of sorts... completely out of any recognized "norm" as such...
It's been said repeatedly, "Nothing is a singularly unique event." SO I'm glad he let his medical information get published. They proved it CAN happen, so the rest of us should postulate from that, it CAN and PROBABLY WILL happen again. It may also have happen much more in the past than we think. We just weren't able to capture and measure it... yet. ;o)
@@scurvofpcp the reverse is also a problem. Some doctors go zebra hunting and waste a lot of time and energy and money.
The problem is that the doctor to patient ratio just makes it incredibly hard for patients to get the care they need. Not to mention the cost of healthcare causes people to delay care and treatment.
@@scurvofpcp EDS is not a zebra, those are incompetent, lazy, profit-motivated doctors. EDS is a fairly common condition. So is Crohns. Millions of people have those. If a person has hypermobility, fatigue, and joint pain, EDS is the #1 most likely cause.
@@crazyjkass I personally know 8 doctors that will say that you are wrong on the EDS, and 5 for the Crohns.
This is where our medical care is at.
Heard about this a while ago, though it didn't say it was rogue tapeworm eggs, but that the tapeworm itself had cancer, it metastasized and grew in the man because of his immune system was so weak.
It's crazy how much our immune systems do for us. It prevents all kinds of things we'd never even notice until someone has immunodificiency
I'm always amazed at cases where ease diseases are found. Mostly because this means the doctors had to be really invested, having extreme patience and attention to detail to not misdiagnose. Where the doctors I know, make it feel like they disregard what a lot of the details they're told, and want to diagnose the first thing that "seems to be" to get the patient a prescription and out of the office.
Ikr! I come in with severe fatigue localized in my legs and they diagnosed me with depression 🤦 like yes depression can cause pain but i highly doubt it would be so extremely localized to my legs!
Definitely, I spent 3 months with pulmonary embolisms, which aren't very uncommon which the doctor kept calling pleurisy. I'm was a young female, so I'm pretty sure he actually diagnosed me with hypochondria. I went to the hospital even though my doctor didn't even believe I was ill, and was immediately put in ICU. I spent 10 days in the hospital and almost died from that case of "hypochondria".
@@purplerose2124 your legs were depressed /JOKE
I know, right? Imagine getting an answer other than “just lose some weight” or “are you sure you’re not pregnant?”
Seriously. I even got a rather insistent “You could be pregnant, are you really sure you’re not pregnant?” when I went to the clinic with side pain following a car crash. And yes, the fact I’d been in a car crash the day before was the first information I gave the doctor. Diagnosis: pregnant. Did you know pregnancy worked like that? Get T-boned, give birth to little traffic cones or something.
@@bookcat123 giving birth to traffic cones is the strangest idea i've ever heard but if that becomes a thing i think traffic safety companies would do that
You all drop some of the most interesting videos. A little scary, but interesting.
@@GeoffreyHellington yeehaw
Check out ChubbyEmu
@@GeoffreyHellington Y’all’d’ve
@@GeoffreyHellington fair ‘nuff
Please do more videos like this - rare and strange diseases like this are really fascinating!
My dad had a rare form of sarcoma. It wasn’t in his lungs, but in his arm/wrist. He is one of only 68 people in the world with the same kind of cancer. He is part of a research study. He almost had to have his arm cut off at the elbow to keep it from spreading.
"So, bad news, you have cancer."
"There's good news?"
"We'll be naming it after you."
Sounds like something you’d see in a House MD episode
Yeah but not as funny without Hugh Laurie's sarcastic delivery.
As far as I know they generally don't do untreatable things on that show... too much of a downer, I guess. But yeah, it would fit the bill in every other aspect.
@@trishapellis They do functionally untreatable things a lot, like advanced metastatic melanoma, and patients walk out because "TV magic".
@@HeythemMD That too. It's a long time since I've seen the show, but what I remember is things like a guy who was a vegetable who ended up "waking up" after everything failed, because of one injection, because House had just figured out that the braindead part had nothing to do with the rest of the symptoms or something... and the woman who had her breasts removed and had breast cancer in the back of her knee, and it's presented like "few weeks of chemo you'll be right as rain". The producers don't like to let House lose the game.
When stem cells were brought up, I actually thought of S5E2 - gained by parasite, not by transplantation, but KIND OF a similar concept?
That is crazy.
The patient was very gracious in offering his body, his case first research and allowing the publication of his case. He may end up saving other people's lives in the unlikely event something like this happens again.
Two of my uncles had extremely rare forms of epilepsy and are in medical textbooks because of it. One of them, treatments have helped immensely so he’s living a fairly normal life in retirement, and the other (who has since passed away) even split brain surgery did absolutely nothing for.
I would check myself in to the doctor I think epilepsy is inheritable
I wonder if anti-tapeworm medication would affect these cells? Also is the immunological vulnerabilities caused by untreated HIV infection a mandatory factor or just increases the odds of this disease?
The HIV is the key here. When the body sees anything foreign it reacts to defend itself. The more different that substance is the stronger the reaction. In a immunocompetent person the tapeworm cells would have been attacked violently by the immune system. But the HIV made that impossible. It is hard to say whether anti-parasitic medication would have helped. The way these medications work is by targeting some specific celular function (like the creation of a specific protein) that might have been mutated and thus the medication might have done nothing.
Anti parasitic drugs usually work by targeting a part of the tape worm's lifecycle, so since these are tape worm cells growing uncontrollably I'm not sure it would be effective
Most antiparasitic drugs just destroy the gut of worms, starving them to death. That's why it only works on adult worms and not on larvae, so antiparasitic drugs wont work on this....
>anti-tapeworm medication
I was wondering about the same thing. According to the linked paper the doctors did use albendazole to treat the tapeworm infection but evidently that didn't kill the tapeworm-derived cancer. There are two other medications commonly prescribed for Hymenolepis nana infection: praziquantel and niclosamide/nitazoxanide. The former works by paralyzing the tapeworm so may not do much, but the latter is outright cytotoxic to tapeworm cells and in fact is already being considered for (regular, human) cancer treatment. Perhaps if it ever happens again doctors should try niclosamide/nitazoxanide first.
www.cdc.gov/parasites/hymenolepis/health_professionals/index.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niclosamide
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitazoxanide
Probably increased the odds of it happening. I remember hearing about one of the first cases where the fellow got a parasite that normally showed in sheep. Something about a weakened IS opens certain microbial doors.
I am constantly amazed at what can go wrong in the human body.
i don't know if i would use the word "amazed"
@@CartoonKidOLLY It just means greatly surprised, it doesn't mean I like it!
Wait until you find out what can go wrong in the human mind 😂
@@AudioAlurenahh. hell no
OMG 😭!! It's been 7 years since I stumbled onto Michael Aranda's Scishow videos. I remember binge watching the Scishow Quizshow series which helped me learn lots of stuff. I really loved this video as well. Scishow has always been my favourite 💓
Wonderful work as always. Direct, concise and easy to understand.
This is something out of House M.D.
Chase: "Its hiv, the patient just hasn't taken his meds"
House: "That explains x but what about his cells"
Then the "tapeworm cancer" reveal at the end with the snazzy graphics with dr.House's narration in the background...
Dammit, I automatically read that second line in an Australian accent in my head
I actually have a condition with my heart of which the doctors do not know what it is. One doctor said that I had anxiety but the symptoms I have are much worse than that. It’s been a while since I had the last attack but it could happen anytime for unknown reasons.
Yeah, I had something similar. In the end doctors found epilepsy-like excitation in my brain and was surprised that I never had epileptic seizures. Thankfully I got better with time and now attacks are rare and mild compared to that I had previously - full-on panic, pain, severe nausea, venospasm and/or hypertensive crisis, etc. Symptoms varied each time, which made my condition so confusing to doctors.
@@EvilRussian13
Thank goodness for advances in medical technology.
Same for me and I keep having a heart populations attacks every 2 days and it all started after i drank massive amount of coffee one year ago and my life has been miserable since then, im so glad that i found a person that has the same problem
@@mohamedtrfnx6632
In my case it all started after riding bicycle. I stopped fast, then I felt my heart in my throat and I felt like I was about to die. Ever since then, I’ve been having those issues. Luckily, the episodes are becoming less and less. Been almost a year since I had the issue.
@@mohamedtrfnx6632 Weird. I have hypersensitivity to caffeine, and drinking it is the quickest way to induce an attack for me. You know, that may be linked in some way.
And I thought my cancer, PMP (pseudomyxoma peritonei) was rare. It used to be called one in a million, but now people think it is 3/4 people in a million each year. Mine is terminal but it is so slow growing that it has been terminal since 2014, and I'm still here, and think I have a few more years yet, I hope.
It is actually an ovarian (sometimes non ovarian) cancer that spreads to your entire belly. That too specific type, mucinous cystadenoma, I guess. That's why so rare. I mean first you have to get specific type of ovarian cancer then it must get advanced enough to spread to entire belly. Kind of bad luck 😔
My mom had throat cancer which was rare. What’s strange that she doesn’t smoke or do any harm to herself. She was pretty healthy. And somehow she got it. The doctors tried so many medications and ways to keep her alive.. sadly, none of them worked.
I’m sorry for your loss
passive smoking is also dangerous.
you can get cancer from literally doing nothing. its only a matter of time until your immune system shits itself and doesnt properly kill a cancer cell before it becomes an issue
@@lord_ng Sadly, some patients develop cancer or other diseases. Without ever being exposed to harmful substances that could cause them.
Did she give blow jobs? That can cause throat papillomas
I can’t claim to have had an ultra rare medical condition or know anyone who has. But my own personal “wtf” moment was when I was diagnosed with Epididymo Orchitis and the tests came back with E. Coli as being the offending bug that caused it. In my demographic at the time, the most common cause of it were two well-known STIs. But for me…. E. Coli.
Wasn’t pleasant at all. But the best that doctors could say was “sometimes these things just happen”. Gratefully, it being E. Coli and not STI-caused probably saved my relationship with my girlfriend at the time. 😅
An STD...?
Damn, imagine getting ntr'd by a disease
I had a weird one a year or so ago. I went in for some fairly standard blood tests related to a new medication. I got the results back and they indicated that I had _had_ and recovered from Hepatitis C. I was like "I've never had Hep C!" My Doctor was dismissive. "Doesn't matter. You don't have it now, but at some time in the past you did. You've got the antibodies." I'm still stumped as to how I got it. There's only a couple ways to contract it, and one is impossible and the other is unlikely. Best guess is my Ex gave it to me. (I know she gave me Mono when we first got together in the early 90's.)
@@tarmaque it's transmissible through period blood, so if you ever had contact with that and she had it, it's definitely possible
@@laethe230 There's all sorts of ways I could have got it from _her,_ but I never knew she had it. It probably came from one of her various extramarital affairs. Thanks.
There is a characteristic known to (often zoonotic) parasites, called larval migrans. In general terms, this may happen when a parasite is not perfectly suited to its host and the larvae, in an attempt to find the proper environment, begin 'swimming' through the body's tissues, looking for their home (Toxocara canis); it is also a typical behavior of other types of parasites (trichinosis).
Although this hookworm seems perfectly adapted to humans, I wonder if an atavistic 'larval migration capability' was triggered by the unusual immune environment. This would answer the question 'how did these cells physically travel from the intestine to various other places in the patient's body'.
Blood
I wonder whether the HIV had its role in the mutations of the parasitic eggs?!
@@Littleprinceleon yes hiv helped them with weak environment
My grands had a neighbor who became more and more bizarre, seeming to lose the usual social limits/norms. He wound up in a facility for the criminally insane - but it was only after he died that that autopsy revealed he had a cranial lesion associated with a parasite that had lodged in his head. How did it get there? The person who said, 'By blood' was the what the doctors decided. Sad and creepy.
@@sealyoness 😂😂😂😂 not possible there is blood brain barrier in the brain, it must have gone through ear
So not only was it cancer, it was foreign cancer! My guess as to how to treat this form is to do tests on dwarf tapeworms who have the same mutations and see which treatments make the cells go away. Might be sacrilege to make a parasite feel better, but if successful and this situation happens again someone's life could potentially be saved.
The funny thing is that there are actually a shocking amount of similarities across all cancers.
There are primary categories, typically separated according to the location of origination (which makes most of the differences actually simply differences between the cells of different locations; for example: breast cancer vs colon cancer).
Then there are the initial subcategories of cancers that primarily deal with strong structural differences which also tend to cause drastic differences in treatment ability. For example: small-cell lung cancer and non-small-cell lung cancer.
Then it breaks down even further to detail small and specific mutations.
Despite all this, the funny thing is how many similarities there still are. Over 90% of all types of cancers, whether lung cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, etc, have the Warburg Effect. The Warburg Effect does benefit cancers by strongly enabling their reproduction rate, but is vulnerable to a specific change in metabolic state. The Warburg Effect disables the primary path for cellular energy production, and then ramps up the secondary path to increase its amount of usable material without significant loss of energy (because it ramped up the use of the 2nd path). However, the primary path can use both glucose (blood sugar - the normal source) and ketones (recently ingested fat altered by the liver to be a fuel source alternative to glucose) to produce energy, while the 2nd path can ONLY use glucose. A metabolic state called Ketosis is where the body switches from using glucose as its primary fuel source to using ketones as its primary fuel source. In such a metabolic state, the cells of the cancers with the Warburg Effect will starve, causing a slow process of weakening to eventual death of the cancer cells.
Also, piperine, a component of Black Pepper. It has been found in studies to 1, increase the absorption of some chemotherapy drugs; 2, reduce the toxic load of said drugs on normal cells; and 3, prevent and reverse the adaptive ability of cancer cells against the drug. This has been found to be the case in several cancers, but has not yet (to my knowledge) been tested in a clinical trial. Also, it was tested in at least 3 different types of cancers and shown to have this effect.
In summation, although there are so many different variations to cancer, it would be more worthwhile to find more generalized solutions than to find super specified ones - and this is because there are so many different variations in cancer. The best way to do this is to target the mutations that are more widespread rather than the nitty-gritty super specific details, such as the Warburg Effect or the Reverse Warburg Effect (not exactly reversed; more like a different method with the same end product).
Also, please note that I am not a doctor, let alone an oncologist. Do not take this stated information as medical advise, but rather as a vague presentation of information.
if im not wrong, the reason cancer is so hard to kill is because they are so similar to your cells. Treatments that kill cancer cells will also take a toll on your body. Doesnt that mean you can kill foreign cancer just by using tapeworm medication, or whatever medicine that kills tapeworm cells. with little to no risk of it attacking your own cells.
The tapeworm cancer cells were able to form in his body most likely because he was Immunodeficient from untreated HIV, cancer is so deadly because it's *your own* cells dividing uncontrollably whereas a foreign organism's cancer would be detected and destroyed by the immune system
@@peterhoemke2994 comment later
As a medical sudent who worked in papers about rare cancers (heart lymphoma), I really appreciate the video
Rare diseases are nice to study but knowing the common things well is more important. Most people have common things, sometimes with atypical presentation.
As someone who is in the rare disease category (missing 2 out of the 4 proteins in my DNA), this video was very interesting. I'm glad that the patient gave permission to the doctors to study and document his case.
Wait so you’re dna doesn’t have the ATGC, it only has 2 of those? I didn’t know people could only have two and be alive
ACTG are nucleotides, not proteins, I think it would be utterly impossible to live without those. Maybe it's histones OP's referring to, seems more believable, although I could be dead wrong.
That's a pretty vague statement from OP, they probably should elaborate what they meant by that
I'm pretty sure your DNA has far more than 4 proteins...
@@adjectivenoun5052 OP whats that?
Hey Emily, what's your disease called? It's good that you are spreading awareness to this type of disease
I appreciate all the SciShow hosts but this man is my favorite. Thank you Mr. Aranda.
I admit it, I like his hair. However. he speaks clearly and his modulation keeps me interested.
As a pharm student with a major interest in immunology and parasitology, this is just amazing. Impressed something like that could happen... Great video, thanks for the divulgation.
My cousin passed away this morning from a rare form of cancer that was detected after 2 years. Her doctors said that survival is 0%. RIP Ebone 💜
Sorry to hear that 😔
I appreciate that.
What was it called
My mother died to an unknown degenerative brain disease, that even doctors in my country(philippines) don't know what causes and how to cure its illness. We went to 3 neurologist but none could give a difinitive answer, the best they can come up with is it's a disease similar to ALS.
In beginning stage of her illness, she seems normal. But she sometimes fall on her own, that we advice her not to lock the door when she's on the toilet, then later her balance starts losing that we need to hold her while she's walking, and she cannot control her mouth that it even affect her speech which is why she can't speak properly, and she also starts losing weight and cannot use her hands writing. It come to a time that she cannot walk anymore so we just have to carry her or put her on a wheelchair if she wants to go somewhere, we also just use adult diapers since she cannot control her bladder anymore. 5 years later, after she got diagnosed by that unknown disease she died. So if there's an expert here that knows, can you please explain what disease it really was?
Sincere sorry for her...
I knew a beautiful lady who presented degeneration (USA) back in the 1980s. The doctors were absolutely stumped how a 30-something woman was displaying rapid-fire dementia. Horrifying to a 20-something paraprofessional, devastating to her husband and parents (not to leave out her young sons). My sincerest regrets. :(
@Dwight Alexander Kinda sounds like myasthenia gravis.🤷♂️
@@sealyoness I had a shirt-tail relative (wife of my Mom's cousin) who contracted Alzheimer's disease in her early 50's and died of it before she was 60. Unusual presentation, but not unheard of. She was a nice lady and it was a sad course of events. Coincidentally, one of my Dad's coworkers had the same thing happen to her husband. He died at 62.
Even ALS isn't well understood, so honestly, even Israeli doctors (the best in the world) wouldn't necessarily be able to give you a firm diagnosis. Her condition could've been viral, genetic, autoimmune, cancer, or caused by any number of other factors. Your best bet for an answer would've been to allow an autopsy and complete dissection of her brain and spinal cord, with the study sent for review by top medical science experts around the world. But that would've depended entirely on her wishes.
Love this channel. Nobody is more excited about science than Hank Green, But Michael Aranda is my favorite host.
I'm a big fan of Rose Bear Don’t Walk too.
I tend to like the hosts that I see the most often.
@@WanderTheNomad Do you tend to most often watch the hosts that you like?
@@RedSunT But then, which happened first?
@@tarmaque I love her!
Thank you so much Sci Show, greetings from Bimac Research group at Universidad del Cauca, Colombia.
Narration is great. Thank you 😊
I remember this being brought up in the fact-off on scishow tangents! Fascinating and horrifying
This was truly fascinating. There always needs to be that first case, and it is a shame that the man passed away. I do hope this was a one-off situation.
Awesome post, thank you
My mother died due to breast cancer last month. She was also suffering from COPD. May her soul rest in peace...🙏
I'm sorry. I lost an grandmother and an aunt to such cancer.
5 months is pretty fast! Going on 2 years and counting with no diagnosis for me.
This man really couldn't catch a break
Oh wow. I had heard something about this one but never knew anything about the mechanism behind it. Thanks for researching and sharing this.
I'm just thinking... If I had a rare disease and would go to my doctor, telling him about fatigue, weight loss, fever and a cough, he'd just be like: "You need to relax. I'll prescribe a week of sick leave. Also: You should do more sports and reduce stress at your work." If after two weeks the symptoms weren't better, he'd probably say: "Looks psychosomatic.", and prescribe some anti-depressant. And that's that. No one would ever know of this strange new disease.
the way that happened to me when i was dying of chronic active ebv. took me 5 years to get antivirals n that was for oral herpes, didn’t really help my condition but knocked my lesions out. antidepressants do help but that’s cause i’m mentally bonkers
I remember reading about this years ago when I was in med school. It was wild to read.
Looking forward to being educated
Nice Vidz! Bravo!
My grandma had a rare cancer, the hospital only had one other patient to ever have it back in the 80s, and the cancer didn’t have a name. this type of cancer was very aggressive, every time you cut it out, it would grow some where else, it also made you get other kinds of cancer, life span is only 4 years. The hospital that try to treat my grandma was in Australia Brisbane, it specialised in cancer treatment, everyone in the country went there, but no hope still.
I had an exceedingly rare form of lymphoma that was caused by rheumatic fever. When I was diagnosed I was the first case ever reported, and what they found out is that the rheumatic fever caused a runaway effect, and my body released immature white blood cells. In order to both get the cytokine reaction down, they had to give me a massive dose of methotrexate, like it was high enough that there was a good chance I may never have children. A few months later, they did another blood test and the lymphoma was gone. So far they have only seen a thing like that once, and essentially it's only been found in children.
This is the most interesting side of cancer to me. As tragic as it is, there is a cruel beauty in it. Each case, while similar to other times each type develops, it’s like a newly evolved life form. Your cells, or in this case tapeworms, have evolved into something new and sometimes aggressive and uncontrollable. What’s most interesting here is how it actually seems like tapeworms evolving into new forms of their normal form. It is a new stage of their existence, only happened once that we’ve ever seen, and was incredibly strange and complex. I hate cancer but I love science behind it. Hopefully no one else faced this kind of cancer again
Really fascinating. I had no idea.
Respect for putting sources . It's literally a must do but 99.9% of "science" channels don't even bother and most people don't care.
But for those who're actually interested this is very nice. Thank you ❤️
Yeah I’m signing off this video, this ones too much for me. Thanks scishow for once again for doing great, yet horrifying research.
I'm glad that AIDS patient agreed to donate his labs and body to science. These unique cases can teach us a lot about each of the factors involved.
I like the guy who talked about the topic! Great presence
I read this case report!! It is in NEJM. So fascinating.
I have a condition that isn't 'rare', but the situation sure was. I had pelvic organ prolapse. I started developing it at 13 years old and was at stage 4 by age 15. Doctors were shocked because they had never seen someone so young have their uterus, bladder, and intestines all fall out as severe as mine was. Prolapse is not a rare condition, but the age and circumstances were EXTREMELY rare.
Also, it really showed me how much the medical field sucks at diagnosis because even after I told them multiple times, they didn't believe me until I walked in with a picture.
Most doctors just write it off as being dramatic.
That's a severe problem and I heard it's especially common for women and even more common for black women -- having your symptoms ignored or brushed off
Do you have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome?
@johnnyearp52 actually yes. Myopathic EDS. They did genetic testing because they suspected it was a connective tissue issue.
Apparently, the genetic mutation lined up with Myopathic EDS along with a majority of the symptoms.
Unfortunately since Myopathic is the second rarest type of EDS, there isn't much studies on it.
I am sorry that you have to go through all that.
I was told that I probably have EDS.
But my symptoms are not as severe.
@johnnyearp52 severe or not, it can still impact your daily life. EDS is NOT fun. Even if it isn't organs falling out and almost dying, it can still be extremely difficult to live with. Despite the symptoms, it is important that people believe you. I also hope you are able to manage it to be as close as pain-free as possible.
Rest In Peace to this man, who suffered so that we may know better next time.
This is scary given how it's seems like those types of situations that is too late to reverse the moment you find out about it. Poor guy.
I thank this man for his generosity in helping us all to help the future 🙏
A final act that will forever be remembered in our medical literature.
This is the stuff of nightmares. 😯
Not as cool… but I’m used as a case study. I went in for frequent sinus infections. Referred to surgery. I had every known possible sinus/nasal issue possible in one human being. Post surgery haven’t had a single sinus infection. Not as cool as some rare disease. But pretty cool to be used in classrooms 😊
What surgery did you have that ended up fixing it!
how the hell did you even managed to get EVERY possible sinus issue.
@@lookatmyfacern built different...
My friend has a rheumatic condition (we actually both got diagnosed a month apart). They're in their late twenties but there symptoms and disease progression are more like something that's seen in someone in their fifties or sixties.. pretty much entirely due to lifestyle. They're a case study now, lol
This one is so unusual and mind boggling that i need to watch it again.
I remember that from an episode of SciShow Tangents. Minds were blown.
3:07 Not wrong but inappropriate image. In cancer diagnostics, cell markers like cytokeratin and vimentin are visualized using immunohistochemistry, not immunofluorescence, as shown here. Those look completely different and serves different purpose on visualization. I think you didn't consult a pathologist while putting this particular slide.
He called pathologists scientists within the first 10 seconds. However wrote this script is FKN clueless. Pathologists are medical specialists with more than 10 years of training. Anyone can do a 3 year BSc and call themselves a "scientist"
I have a rare disease (IIH - Intracranial Idiopathic Hypertension, it has less than 200,000 cases in the U.S. per year) and I truly hope my case can help with people who’ll get it in the future. They don’t even know what causes it yet. They know how to treat it and what the risk factors can be, but other than that, they have no clue. They only have guesses on what causes it at this point.
“IIH happens when too much cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) - the fluid around the brain and spinal cord - builds up in your skull. This puts extra pressure on your brain and on the nerve in the back of your eye, called the optic nerve.” - from the National Eye Institute.
But what causes the buildup of the fluid? Nobody knows for sure.
When I first was diagnosed with it the year before I had started to get back pain on the same side my optic nerve was swollen.
I'm from Colombia and live in Colombia and I'm now suddenly very scared of this extremely rare cancer that I may never get in my entire life
God, imagine how TERRIFYING it would be to hear “your tapeworm gave you cancer”
Kinda hits home this. As far as I know I am the only known case of odd and severe neurological disorder caused by a prescription med used for depression, at least for that particular med anyway. I was slapped with the diagnosis of FND as that was the closest thing but not really correct in my opinion.
what do those acronyms mean and what are they /genq /nf
@@teraspeXt FND (functional neurological deficit/disorder). That describes most but not all my symptoms. Technically I have something of a mixture PAWS (post acute withdrawal syndrome) FND and PSSD (post SSRI sexual dysfunction). It was caused by the withdrawal from a drug called Rexulti which is used to treat schizophrenia and depression, in my case depression. As far as my research and that of my doctors, hospital and neurologist, I might be the only case of this.
Came for an informative video on cancer, left with nightmare fuel about worm parasites that give you cancer. Thanks SciShow.
Damn, literal example of evolution and how new life originates.
What a wild case!
I love brilliant, I started the calculus course and it's like the skeleton of fractions, everything makes so much more sense now
Doctor: I’m afraid you have a very rare disease
Patient: How rare is it?
Doctor: Well, you get to name it
Looks like a case for a new episode of House MD.
Where at the end he would say "Cancer is Boring, but maybe not so much."
Fascinating !!
i would guess that treating the tapeworm tumors would be easier to treat than normal cancers because you can take meds for the parasites and you don't have to worry about collateral damage like you would with cancer treatments
That's quite interesting. When we put cancer cell lines into mice, we have to use mice with no immune system or the cancer will be seen as non self and eliminated.
HIV patients could potentially catch someone else's cancer if their immune system was depleted enough
If their immune system is so depleted they will die from things like TB or PCP or 10s of other infectious causes. Catching cancer doesn't happen as cancer cells don't survive and aren't adapted at infecting other tissues, while even with HIV one still has an immune system. You don't hear of transplant patients getting other peoples' cancers do you? These days HIV treatment prevents immunodeficiency.
This fact blew my mind when I heard it on Scishow Tangets. Glad it got its own dedicate video here.