A 58-year-old man with a rare disease saw the same face he saw on screen and on paper, but in person took on demonic qualities. The patient suffered from a unique form of facial dysmorphia (PMO), a disorder that causes people’s faces to appear distorted, reptilian, or otherwise inhuman.
a new study publish exist lancet This case is described as being unique in that, to the man, the faces only seemed demonic when they were physically present. For 31 months, the patient has suffered from a distorted face; at first, it was painful for him, but now, he is “used to it,” the newspaper said.
Because faces on screen and in real life appear ordinary to him, the research team had a unique opportunity to explore how distortion manifests itself and create accurate visualizations of “demonic” faces.
Antônio Mello said: “In other studies of this condition, patients with PMO were unable to assess whether their distorted visualizations accurately represented what they were seeing because the visualization itself also depicted a face, so patients distortions on it are also perceived,” said Dartmouth researcher and lead author of the study, in a university news release. “Through this process, we are able to visualize the patient’s immediate perception of facial distortion.”
For patients, the distortion of the human face is disturbing. The eyes are elongated and angular, the nostrils flare outward, and the lips stretch outward to take up the entire width of the face. A groove appears on the forehead, and the ears twist into an elf shape with sharp points at the end. In milder cases, facial features simply droop, look incorrect, or are smaller or larger than they are in real life.
In another case, publish exist lancet In 2014, a 52-year-old woman in the Netherlands reported:
A lifetime of seeing people’s faces transform into dragon-like ones and hallucinating similar faces multiple times a day. She can sense and recognize real faces, but after a few minutes, they darken, develop long, pointed ears and protruding noses, and take on reptilian skin and bright yellow, green, blue, or red colors big eyes. She sees similar dragon faces floating toward her from walls, electrical outlets, or computer screens multiple times a day, with or without dragon face designs, and at night she sees many dragon faces in her room. dark.
People with PMO are often diagnosed with other illnesses, such as schizophrenia, and take antipsychotic medications, said Brad Duchaine, senior author of the study and principal investigator at Dartmouth’s Social Perception Laboratory.
“It’s not uncommon for people with PMO not to tell others about their facial perception problems because they worry others will think the distortions are a sign of mental illness,” Du Lian said. “This is an issue that people often don’t understand.”
The team noted that the 58-year-old patient had a history of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suffered a head injury at the age of 43. The patient, who had no visual impairment, had a small round lesion in the left hippocampus, which the team concluded was a cyst.Others with the following conditions Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (a collective term for perceptual distortions) has also been reported with brain damage; encephalitis, migraines, and psychoactive drug use have also been associated with the syndrome, although these conditions have not been observed in recent patient cases.
To characterize facial distortions, the researchers asked the man to describe the perceived differences between the face of a person in the room with him and a photo of that person. Due to his PMO, his face is distorted and the face on the screen looks like a normal face.
PMO only lasts a few days for some people, while it can last for years for others. Only 75 PMO case reports have been published, According to researchers. This is certainly a rarer and more disturbing perceptual disorder, but understanding how it manifests means fewer patients will be misdiagnosed in the future.
more: Major new study uncovers key clues to chronic fatigue syndrome
