Brooke Greenberg (born January 8, 1993), is an American from Reisterstown, Maryland, who has remained physically and cognitively similar to a toddler, despite her increasing age. She is about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighs about 16 pounds (7.3 kg), and has an estimated mental age of nine months to one year. Brooke's doctors have termed her condition Syndrome X.
Brooke was born on January 8, 1993 at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, one month prior to her due date, weighing just four pounds (1.8 kg). She was born with anterior hip dislocation, a condition which caused her legs to be swiveled upwards toward her shoulders; this was corrected surgically. Otherwise, Brooke appeared to be a normal infant.
In her first six years, Brooke Greenberg went through a series of unexplained medical emergencies from which she recovered. She had seven perforated stomach ulcers. She also suffered a seizure. This was followed by what was later diagnosed as a stroke; weeks later, no damage was detected. At age five, Brooke had a mass in her brain that caused her to sleep for 14 days. The doctors diagnosed the mass as a brain tumor. However, Brooke later awoke, and physicians found no tumor present. Brooke's pediatrician, Dr. Lawrence Pakula, states that the source of her sudden illness remains a mystery.
To keep food from getting into her lungs, Brooke is fed through a permanent stomach tube. Feeding her through the tube takes ten hours a day.
In 2006, Richard Walker, PhD in endocrine physiology of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, said that Brooke's body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic disorder or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why. Her telomeres seem to be shortening at the normal rate.
In 2009, Walker said: "There've been very minimal changes in Brooke's brain ... Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected." Walker noted that Greenberg's brain, for example, is not much more mature than that of a newborn infant. He estimates her mental age at around nine months to a year old. Brooke can make gestures and recognize sounds, but cannot speak. Her bones are like those of a ten-year-old, and she still has her baby teeth, which have an estimated developmental age of about eight years. Said Walker, "We think that Brooke's condition presents us with a unique opportunity to understand the process of aging." "Different parts of her body are developing at different rates, as if they were not a unit but parts of separate organisms," Walker explains.
Dr. Walker believes that the condition resulted from a failure of central control genes. He has identified two more people with similar developmental issues: Gabrielle Williams of Montana (born 2004) and Nicky Freeman of Australia (born 1970), a forty-year-old man who looks like a boy. Others, such as British biologist Aubrey de Grey, believe that aging and development are not related.
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