Just today while I was doing research on the fact that at least two types of animal species have been found to be biologically immortal, meaning they don’t older, I stumbled upon the story about Brooke Greenberg, who at this time is a 19 year old female but appears to have not grown older through the years. Her anthropomorphic measurements are just about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighs about 16 pounds (7.3 kg) which is about the usual size of a 1 year old. Her physical and mental maturity seems to not have progressed at all.
Her story was really big a few years ago when ABC News did a story on her.
From the Wikipedia article on her HERE….
Brooke Greenberg (born January 8, 1993), is an American from Reisterstown, Maryland, who has remained physically and cognitively similar to a toddler, despite her increasing age. She is about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighs about 16 pounds (7.3 kg), and has an estimated mental age of nine months to one year. Brooke’s doctors have termed her condition Syndrome X.
Brooke was born on January 8, 1993 at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, one month prior to her due date, weighing just four pounds (1.8 kg). She was born with anterior hip dislocation, a condition which caused her legs to be swiveled upwards toward her shoulders; this was corrected surgically. Otherwise, Brooke appeared to be a normal infant.
Birth and early life
In her first six years, Brooke Greenberg went through a series of unexplained medical emergencies from which she recovered. She had seven perforated stomach ulcers. She also suffered a seizure. This was followed by what was later diagnosed as a stroke; weeks later, no damage was detected. At age five, Brooke had a mass in her brain that caused her to sleep for 14 days. The doctors diagnosed the mass as a brain tumor. However, Brooke later awoke, and physicians found no tumor present. Brooke’s pediatrician, Dr. Lawrence Pakula, states that the source of her sudden illness remains a mystery.
To keep food from getting into her lungs, Brooke is fed through a permanent stomach tube. Feeding her through the tube takes ten hours a day.
Unexplained condition
Over the past several years, the Greenbergs visited many specialists, looking for an explanation for their daughter’s strange condition, yet there has been no diagnosis of any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality. In 2001, when Dateline documented Brooke, she was still the size of a six-month-old infant, weighing just 13 lb (5.9 kg) at 27 inches (69 cm) tall. The family still had no explanation. Brooke Greenberg’s mother Melanie said, “They [the specialists] just said she’ll catch up. Then we went to the nutritionist, the endocrinologist. We tried the growth hormone…”. The growth hormone treatment had no effect. Howard, Brooke’s father, said: “I mean she did not put on an ounce or she did not grow an inch … That’s when I knew there was a problem.” After the growth hormone administration failed, the doctors, unable to diagnose a known condition, named her condition Syndrome X.
The Greenbergs made many visits to nearby Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, and even took Brooke to New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, searching for information about their daughter’s condition. When geneticists sequenced Greenberg’s DNA, they found that the genes associated with the premature aging diseases were normal, unlike the mutated versions in patients with Werner syndrome and progeria.
Medical studies
In 2006, Richard Walker, PhD in endocrine physiology of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, said that Brooke’s body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic disorder or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why. Her telomeres seem to be shortening at the normal rate.
In 2009, Walker said: “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.” Walker noted that Greenberg’s brain, for example, is not much more mature than that of a newborn infant. He estimates her mental age at around nine months to a year old. Brooke can make gestures and recognize sounds, but cannot speak. Her bones are like those of a ten-year-old, and she still has her baby teeth, which have an estimated developmental age of about eight years. Said Walker, “We think that Brooke’s condition presents us with a unique opportunity to understand the process of aging.” “Different parts of her body are developing at different rates, as if they were not a unit but parts of separate organisms,” Walker explains.
Dr. Walker believes that the condition resulted from a failure of central control genes. He has identified two more people with similar developmental issues: Gabrielle Williams of Montana (born 2004) and Nicky Freeman of Australia (born 1970), a forty-year-old man who looks like a boy. Others, such as British biologist Aubrey de Grey, believe that aging and development are not related.
Me: What is fascinating about this story is that even the geneticists are perplexed by wha they are seeing. this girl is not suffering from the ordinary genetic issues like Werner syndrome or progeria. It states that “She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic disorder or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why. Her telomeres seem to be shortening at the normal rate.” It would appear that she is growing and gaining weight and may be going through the process but the rate at which she is aging and changing is extremely slow. The incident where she developed a brain tumor that went away after a few weeks is ridiculous. At the end of the wikipedia article, I noted the statement that “aging and development are not related”. That is definitely a challenged to what most people would think is so self evident that is common sense but from a scientific point of view makes sense. Aging and development don’t always have to go together, it may just appear from the outside in a phenotypical way to be the same thing. Maybe there are people like Brooke which do age, but don’t develop. They even did a documentary on her entitled ‘Girl Frozen In Time” that aired on TLC.
As for any height increase related news, the doctors did try to put her on a growth hormone therapy but she didn’t gain any height or even weight. Now that is ridiculous. They stated that her body is not developing at the same rate, but separately.
From ABC News 20/20 website HERE…
Doctors Baffled, Intrigued by Girl Who Doesn’t Age
Brooke Greenberg is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler.
She turned 16 in January.
“Why doesn’t she age?” Howard Greenberg, 52, asked of his daughter. “Is she the fountain of youth?”
Such questions are why scientists are fascinated by Brooke. Among the many documented instances of children who fail to grow or develop in some way, Brooke’s case may be unique, according to her doctor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine pediatrician Lawrence Pakula, in Baltimore.
“Many of the best-known names in medicine, in their experience … had not seen anyone who matched up to Brooke,” Pakula said. “She is always a surprise.”
Brooke hasn’t aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa, says Brooke’s body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why.
In a recent paper for the journal “Mechanisms of Ageing and Development,” Walker and his co-authors, who include Pakula and All Children’s Hospital (St. Petersburg, Fla.) geneticist Maxine Sutcliffe chronicled a baffling range of inconsistencies in Brooke’s aging process. She still has baby teeth at 16, for instance. And her bone age is estimated to be more like 10 years old.
“There’ve been very minimal changes in Brooke’s brain,” Walker said. “Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected.”
Brooke’s mother, Melanie Greenberg, 48, sees a different picture. “She loves to shop,” Greenberg said. “Just like a woman.”
Brooke rides in a stroller while her mom shops for clothes in the infant sections of department stores near their home in a Baltimore suburb. That Brooke is in her mid-teens is so mind-boggling that if another mother with a toddler asks Greenberg how old Brooke is, she usually doesn’t try to explain.
“My system always has been to turn years into months,” Greenberg said. “So, if someone asked today, I might say, she’s 16 months old.”
The Toddler Who Rebels Like a Teen
Brooke weighs 16 pounds and is 30 inches tall. She doesn’t speak, but she laughs when she is happy, and she clearly recognizes the people around her. She has three sisters: Emily, 22; Caitlin, 19; and Carly, 13. All three are bright, active and of normal size and development. They say that Brooke has ways of expressing herself like the teenager she is.
“She looks like a 6-month-old, but she kind of has a personality of a 16-year-old,” Caitlin said. “Sometimes we joke about how she rebels.”
Brooke will resist and refuse activities that don’t appeal to her by vocalizing her displeasure, not with words, but with sounds typical of an infant. “She makes it known what she likes and what she doesn’t like,” sister Emily said.
Carly said it no longer seems strange to have an older sister who is still essentially an infant. “As I got older, she was just like another little sister to me,” she said.
In her first six years, Brooke went through a series of medical emergencies from which she recovered, often without explanation. She survived surgery for seven perforated stomach ulcers. She suffered a brain seizure followed by what was diagnosed as a stroke that weeks later left no apparent damage.
At 4, she fell into a lethargy that caused her to sleep for 14 days. Then, doctors diagnosed a brain tumor, and the Greenbergs bought a casket for her.
“We were preparing for our child to die,” Howard Greenberg said. “We were saying goodbye. And, then, we got a call that there was some change; that Brooke had opened her eyes and she was fine. There was no tumor. She overcomes every obstacle that is thrown her way.”
Brooke’s doctor said the source of her sudden illnesses remains a mystery.
“We often did not have a good explanation for why she became ill as quickly and intensely as she did,” Pakula said. “There were many times in which there were real doubts about her ability to survive.”
As she rocks back and forth in a baby swing, Brooke is fed through a tube inserted into her stomach, because her esophagus is so small that swallowed food could back up into her lungs and cause pneumonia.
Doctors recommended growth hormone therapy early in Brooke’s life, but the treatment produced no results.
Howard Greenberg recalled the follow-up visit to the endocrinologist. “We took her back in six months, and the doctor looked at us and said, ‘Why didn’t you give Brooke the growth hormones?’ And I said, ‘We gave Brooke the growth hormones. We gave her everything you told us to do.’ And Brooke didn’t put on a pound, an ounce; she didn’t grow an inch.”
Part of the Family
Brooke’s hair and her nails are the only two things that grow, Howard said. “She has pajamas and outfits that are 10 or 12 years old,” he said.
One of the things she loves most is movement. As Brooke lies on her stomach, Carly often steers her through the house on an ottoman. Brooke also likes to push against open kitchen drawers until they slam shut.
In her crib, “she’s very content,” Howard said. “She has very little conception of time.”
The family has placed a small television near the crib so she can watch whenever she pleases. Her father gets up in the middle of each night to check on her.
Brooke has a caretaker during daytime hours, but the family’s schedule revolves around her, year after year. The Greenbergs take no vacations, have few nights out and involve Brooke in as many family activities as possible.
“To go to a swimming pool for the summer, or belong to a summer club … we tried all those things, and it’s lacking something,” her mother said. “Brooke’s not there. We’re not a family without Brooke.”
Brooke goes to a Baltimore County public school, Ridge Ruxton, dedicated to special education. Based on her age, she would be a junior in high school. Jewel Adiele, one of Brooke’s teachers, said she wonders sometimes what Brooke is thinking or perceiving.
“People who have worked with her in the past or who briefly see her say … there’s no change,” Adiele said. “But I think, in her heart, she changes. I think from day to day, there are changes. They’re not just as visible as you see in a lot of teens.”
To try to determine why Brooke’s aging process has been so irregular — and what it means to the understanding of our genetic makeup — Walker and Sutcliffe have studied samples of Brooke’s cells and DNA to look for what they think may be a genetic mutation never seen before that has affected the way she ages.
Walker, of the University of South Florida, believes that if the gene can be isolated, it may provide clues to questions about why we age and die.
“Without being sensational, I’d say this is an opportunity for us to answer the question, why we’re mortal, or at least to test it,” Walker said. “And if we’re wrong, we can discard it. But if we’re right, we’ve got the golden ring.”
A Key to Understanding How We Age?
If the gene — or complex of genes — is identified, Walker plans to test laboratory animals to determine whether the gene can be switched off and, if so, whether it will cause the animal’s aging to slow.
In the long term, the idea that the aging process might somehow be manipulated raises serious questions about what human beings might do with that knowledge.
“Clearly, that’s the science fiction aspect of it,” said Walker, describing the social and ethical dilemmas that would arise. “We can’t have continued reproduction and people who don’t age.”
One possible reason to slow the aging process, Walker suggested, would be to allow astronauts to travel in space for long periods of time. “But right now, it’s only conjecture,” he said.
Neither Walker nor Pakula, her doctor, can speculate how long Brooke’s life might be. “That’s more of a crystal ball question,” Pakula said. “I think there’s no way of knowing. ”
The visual evidence of that unpredictable future is always there in the family pictures — photographs in which everyone but Brooke is aging.
The Greenbergs are fascinated by the promise that a scientific breakthrough may stem from Brooke, whose own life is governed by the most basic elements: food and shelter; a family’s love; and their ability to see in her far more than meets the eye, having come to terms with the prospect that she will never grow up.
“We love her just the way she is,” Melanie Greenberg said. “We don’t want to change her.”
Added Howard Greenberg, “Brooke is the nucleus of our family. What if Brooke holds the secret to aging? We’d like to find out. We’d like to help people. Everybody’s here for a reason. Maybe this is why Brooke is here.”
For more of Brooke’s story, watch the documentary, “Child Frozen In Time,” Sunday, Aug. 9 at 10 p.m. on TLC.
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