Six years ago, a Canadian neurologist claimed to notice strange symptoms in a cluster of patients in New Brunswick, a province bordering Maine.
According to the neurologist, Dr. Alier Marrero, the patients suffered hallucinations, spasms, rapid memory loss and the sensation that bugs were crawling underneath their skin, but their symptoms and brain scans didn’t neatly fit an existing diagnosis. In other words, the cases were a mystery.
But since then, neurologists who have reviewed the cases have identified clear diagnoses, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and cancer.
A study published this week in JAMA Neurology reinforces those findings, putting the probability of a mystery disease at roughly 1 in a million.
