Head and Neck Cancer

MRI - Results Inconclusive

11/16/2009

Question:

I am concerned about my cousin. Six years ago, she complained about having terrible headaches that began as soon as she woke up and ended as soon as she fell asleep. I saw her a year after she had those terrible headaches, and I noticed that her personality had changed. She seemed irritable and really confused. She had trouble telling the difference between 15 minutes going by and 3 hours going by. She also had a problem with her memmory. This seemed odd, since she had such a clear and detailed memmory. It was odd to see her not being able to remember her relatives, friends, classmates, her own telephone number, or even where she lived. I visited her six months later, she told me that she woke up in the middle of the night because she felt something go off in her head. She could not get out of her bed for 2 days because she could not move. She told me, at that time, she felt as if there was a disconnect between her brain and her body. Unlike the problems she had before, this time she had trouble with complete thoughts, she slurred her words, spoke in fragments, her perception was off, she lacked common sense(appropriate clothing for weather change), she couldn`t even recognize her own photos, and a number of other problems. Two years later, my cousin took a vacation and worked very hard to regain her speech. I am happy to say that she regained her speech, but she wasn`t the same person anymore. Three years later, she got an MRI of her brain to figure out what was going wrong with her, the MRI came back that she was fine, but there was an area of the brain that it couldn`t see through because a large bone was blocking it. How could this be? THere was something terribly wrong with her, so how could the MRI come back with that result?

Answer:

Thank you for visiting NetWellness. This question would be better answered in the Alzheimer's Disease topic. Please look in that topic for an answer to your question.

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Response by:

Catherine Kane, BA
Case Program Coordinator
NetWellness Administration
Case Western Reserve University