NEW YORK/BRASILIA, (Reuters) – Experts on microcephaly, the birth defect that has sparked alarm in the current Zika virus outbreak, say they are struck by the severity of a small number of cases they have reviewed from Brazil.
Consultations among doctors in Brazil and the United States have increased in the last two weeks, and some of the leading authorities on the condition are finding patterns of unusual devastation in scans of the newborns’ malformed brains.
While it’s not known how representative the scans are, the early observations of these doctors point to a tough road ahead for the babies, their families and their communities and heighten the concern surrounding Zika, which is suspected of causing microcephaly.
“We are in the process of very rapid information gathering on what has been seen,” said Dr. William Dobyns, a geneticist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “The condition that I’ve been able to review, very preliminarily, is more severe than simple microcephaly.”
The Zika virus is transmitted by mosquito, causing mild symptoms in about 20 percent of cases, and most people experience no illness at all. But a spike in reported microcephaly cases among babies in areas of Brazil with Zika outbreaks has triggered an international effort to determine whether the virus causes the condition. The suspected association moved the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday to declare an international health emergency. Dobyns has spent 30 years researching and treating microcephaly, a condition defined by abnormally small heads in newborns that can lead to developmental disabilities, from mild to severe. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has sought out his expertise in understanding the unfolding epidemic.
With a small group of geneticists and other microcephaly specialists, he recently reviewed scans of a handful of babies sent by a colleague in Brazil. All the experts were struck by the scale of malformations, he said.
“These children have a very severe form of microcephaly,” Dobyns said. “The brain is not just small, it’s small with malformations of the cerebral cortex and calcifications. It has the appearance of a very severe, destructive injury to the brain.”
Particularly alarming, Dobyns said, is the presence in the Brazilian cases of excess spinal fluid between the brain and skull of the babies.
“If the brain is growing and then suddenly shrinks, then you’ll see fluid between the brain and skull,” he said. “It has a pattern that suggests that the brain has actually decreased in size.”
Dr. Leonardo Vedolin, a neuroradiologist and researcher at the Moinhos de Vento hospital in Porto Alegre, Brazil, shared with Dobyns scans of two more microcephalic babies this week. The doctors belong to a brain defects study group that convenes via videoconference each month. The group is now focused on Zika.
