Via The Globe and Mail: What can a medical mystery from Guam teach New Brunswick about its own strange, deadly disease? Excerpt:
They called it lytico-bodig. As the Second World War drew to a close, U.S. military doctors stationed on Guam noticed many of the Pacific island’s Chamorro people were suffering from a baffling and devastating illness.
The local name for the progressive and fatal disease – said to have come from the Spanish “paralytico” – provided a label for what Islanders described as an illness that disconnects one from one’s family. It captured a constellation of symptoms, including muscle wasting, paralysis, muscle rigidity, shaking, confusion and memory loss. Doctors and researchers observed this strange illness shared characteristics of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and they clamoured to try to understand it, with the hope it would shed light on other neurodegenerative disorders.
In a collection of case reports published in 1961, early investigators documented the deterioration over 12 years of their first patient, whom they described as a “Chamorro housewife.” Her initial chief complaint was of weakness in both her hands. “When last observed in August, 1960, the patient was helpless, bedridden, almost immobile and in a terminal state,” the authors wrote.
The disease was still a mystery when Canadian chemist Susan Murch travelled to Guam as a postdoctoral fellow in 2003 to study a neurotoxin researchers believed might hold the key to solving the puzzle. What she and the scientists she worked with discovered there provided not only what they considered a possible source of the illness, but may also offer clues to a new medical mystery in New Brunswick, where dozens of people have developed unexplained neurological symptoms.
Dr. Murch, working with principal investigator Paul Cox, a U.S. ethnobotanist, found that a toxin produced by blue-green algae called beta-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA, was present in cycad trees, a source of food for the island’s residents. They found the same toxin in the animals residents consumed, such as pigs, deer and bats that ate the seeds, fruit and other parts of the cycad plants. And they also found it in the brain tissue of several Chamorro patients who died of the mysterious disease.
Dr. Cox, together with famed British neurologist Oliver Sacks, hypothesized that neurotoxic BMAA, the amounts of which were magnified as people consumed animals at higher levels of the food chain, might offer a long-sought explanation for what was causing damage to people’s bodies and brains. Today, that hypothesis is still debated. But investigators of the new illness in New Brunswick are revisiting the work of Dr. Murch and her colleagues.
As of mid-July, 48 cases of an unknown neurological syndrome, including six deaths, have been reported in the province, mostly in the Moncton area and the Acadian peninsula. Doctors and researchers investigating the illness say they are looking into various potential causes – among them, BMAA or an algal toxin like it.
