When a 63-year-old wheelchair-bound woman with all the signs of Parkinson’s disease was brought to Brains Hospital for a final diagnosis, doctors were baffled after an MRI of her brain showed normal results.
“There was some confusion about the nature of her condition because on one hand, she showed a stiffening in the limbs and a tendency to fall over – what we call postural instability. And on the other hand, she lacked the usual tremor of the hand associated with the disease,” said Dr Aravinda
R V, a consultant neurologist at the hospital.
The mystery was deepened by her seeming rapid degeneration, from being a fully mobile person to wheelchair-bound within six months. According to neurological experts, it takes years for a patient afflicted with Parkinson’s to manifest the most glaring signs of the disease, including hand tremors, a bent gait and bradykinesia (or slowness of movement).
Worse, having been diagnosed with the disease, the patient was under medication to control the early effects of the disease, only for medical staff to realise that the drugs were not having any effect. Forty-eight hours into her admission at the hospital, however, doctors at Brains discovered that she had been afflicted with uterine cancer nearly a decade ago.
“As soon as we discovered this, we suspected that she had something called atypical Parkinsonism or Paraneoplastic Parkinsonism, which manifests itself in one out of every 10 or 20,000 cancer patients,” Dr Aravinda said, adding that while Parkinson’s is an irreversible degenerative disease, atypical Parkinsonism can be reversed if diagnosed early.
In the case of the patient, doctors also discovered that her cancer had returned and had spread to every organ. She was transferred to oncology, where medical professionals categorised her prospects as bleak.