A new study revealed the exact biological cause of malaria deaths in children, and the finding could lead to groundbreaking new treatments.
Medical research has led to ways to kill the malaria parasite that causes the illness but has still not solved how to eliminate the disease's symptoms, Michigan State University reported. This new research could finally lead to a treatment that reduces the number of malaria deaths seen in children.
"We discovered that some children with cerebral malaria develop massively swollen brains and those are the children who die," said Michigan State University's Dr. Terrie Taylor.
The researchers determined that the brain gets so swollen in some pediatric patients that it is forced through the bottom of the skull, compressing the brain stem.
"Because we know now that the brain swelling is what causes death, we can work to find new treatments," Taylor said. "The next step is to identify what's causing the swelling and then develop treatments targeting those causes. It's also possible that using ventilators to keep the children breathing until the swelling subsides might save lives, but ventilators are few and far between in Africa at the moment."
To make their findings the researchers used an MRI to look at the brains of hundreds of children suffering from cerebral malaria who were patients at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. The medical device was a gift from GE Healthcare; previously the nearest available MRI was located about 1,000 miles away. The team compared the brains of the children who died with those who survived the infection.
"We found that survivors' brains were either never swollen or decreased in size after [two to three] days. This was a triumphant moment," Taylor said. "I wanted to say to the parasite 'Ha! You never thought we'd get an MRI, did you?'"
The findings were published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
