Afflicted with rare disease, woman ages rapidly in days

 

Nguyen Thi Phuong at 21 years old

Nguyen Thi Phuong at 26 years old

Nguyen Thi Phuong, a Vietnamese woman, has been afflicted with a rare disease that had doctors at the Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) Medicine and Pharmacy University Hospital puzzled.

At 26 years of age only, she now looks about 76, and what is intriguing is that the aging process has been in a matter of days only.

Phuong blames her rapid transformation to an old woman to her extreme allergy to seafood.

She said her calvary started when she decided to switch medication to an itchy allergic reaction to seafood that she felt wasn’t giving her enough relief. But, being poor, instead of going to a doctor for consultation, she opted to go and buy cheaper medicine from a local pharmacy.

“After one month of taking the drugs, I became less itchy but hives remained on my skin. Then I switched to traditional medicine and all the hives disappeared, together with my itching. However, my skin began to sag and fold,” Phuong related.

Needless to say that all the medicines she was taking, traditional or otherwise, were to no avail as her rapid-aging skin problem persisted.

There is already some disagreement among doctors over the cause of the rare condition.

Some doctors describe the disease as a rare condition called lipodystrophy or a side effect of too much steroid medication where a layer of fatty tissue beneath the surface of the skin disintegrate while the skin itself continues to grow at a startling pace.

Others say that Phuong might be suffering from mastocytosis, an incurable disorder caused by the presence of too many mast cells brought about by long-term use of traditional medicines often spiked with corticoids.

Nguyen with husband, Tuyen, now 33 years old

Neighbors said Phuong, now 26, is unrecognizable from her former self except for her voice and black hair, which hasn’t been affected by the disease.

“The skin on my face, chest and belly have folds like an old woman who has given birth several times although I have never had a child. But the rapid-aging syndrome hasn’t affected my menstrual cycle, hair, teeth, eyes and mind,” Phuong lamented.

 

Slugger McGuire admits steroid use

Mark McGwire finally came clean, admitting he used steroids when he broke baseball’s home run record in 1998.

“I wish I had never touched steroids. It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era,” McGwire said in a statement on the Cardinals website.

Big Mac, the moniker given him by fans, was summoned to a congressional hearing in 2005 to testify on the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in Major League Baseball, but repeatedly deflected questions that honed in on his personal use.

The burly Cardinal slugger captured the imagination of American sports fans in 1998 when he out-slugged Chicago Cubs Sammy Sosa in their head-to-head battle to break Roger Maris’s 61 coveted home-run record that stood since 1961. McGuire finished the 1998 season with 70 home runs against Sosa’s 66 runs.

The newly hired St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach, by his admission, has now settled for good the issue surrounding his use of steroids during his battle for the home run record