his brain is 90% liquid!

A 44-year-old man presented to the Timone hospital in Marseille for weakness in his left leg which had persisted for two weeks. That day in 2007, the doctors surely had no idea that they had just met one of the most surprising patients of their career. With clumsy words, he tells them that he already had a problem with the same leg when he was 14 — it no longer moved properly. He also specifies that he has had several brain problems since he was a baby.

When fluid infiltrates the brain

Transferred to the service of neurologyneurology from the hospital, the patient undergoes a MRIMRI of the brain. The images are impressive! Unlike a brainbrain normal, which occupies the majority of the volumevolume available from the cranium, his is pushed to the sides, occupying only a very small strip along the wall of the cranium. The third and fourth ventricles as well as the lateral ventricle take up a disproportionate amount of space in the brain, filled with an abnormal quantity of liquidliquid cerebrospinal.

For doctors, it is a hydrocephalushydrocephalus non-communicating; a condition with which the patient was born and for which he underwent a first operation at the age of six months: the installation of a shunt. The shunt diverts excess fluid from the brain to the abdomen where it will be reabsorbed. A readjustment of this shunt relieved his leg when he was 14 years old.

Despite his unusual brain, the patient has a normal life. He is married, has two children and works as a civil servant and has no symptomssymptoms neurological. His intellectual abilities are diminished, he has an IQ (a contested way of measuring an individual’s intelligence) of 75 when the average is around 90-100. After an operation which aims to facilitate the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid between the different parts of the brain, the condition of his leg improves. The patient was released from the hospital and continued his life… with a “swimming pool” in place of the brain.