Young woman lost her appetite for 15 months after stroke

A strange medical case prompted a recent investigation published in the journal Neurocase which talks about a young woman in Canada who lost all hunger pangs for almost a year after having a stroke, which would be the first case of this type reported in the medical literature.

The author of the research, Dr. Dang Khoa Nguyen of the University of Montreal, discovered ischemic stroke of the left island lobe (part of the cerebral cortex located deep in the lateral sulcus of the brain) after the 28-year-old entered the clinic last year with un paralysis of the right side of the body and obvious speech disturbances.

The young woman spent eleven days in the hospital and was able to recover from her illness for which she was discharged. However, about six months after the episode, she realized that since leaving medical care, he hadn’t felt the sensation of hunger.

This led him to be skip a few meals without realizing it, something he didn’t pay attention to at first, believing it to be a consequence of illness and fatigue.

But after a month without being hungry, the young woman decided to inform the doctors of her situation. Specialists at the University of Montreal examined her and found that her body was not feeling any physiological signal that it was time to eat. To cite an example, the young woman’s stomach did not make the classic bowel sounds when she was hungry.

Although he had no problems with perceiving the taste, smell and texture of food, the loss of appetite caused his favorite foods and products to stop giving him pleasure.

Sixteen months after her stroke, the patient returned to the doctor for a new study and reported that a month earlier the feeling of hunger had returned. During that time, the young woman lost 13 kilograms, from 73 to 60 kilograms, but did not experience any other symptoms due to her lack of appetite.

“The loss of hunger was not attributed to drugs, substance use or clinical disorder, and lasted for a period of 15 months,” emphasizes study.

In this context, Nguyen and his colleagues directly linked the problem to the cerebral infarction and pointed out that this was the first case described in the medical literature. As they clarified, The island lobe generally assesses the physiological state of the body, playing an important role in processing taste signals and participating in appetite control and energy balance.

How his function was affected by the stroke, this is presumed to have caused an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system.

This same lobe is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system and, in general, damage to these pathways could negatively affect the ability to perceive hunger.

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