2024-03-26 20:34:52
One winter day, Victor Chara (59 years old) woke up in the American state of Nashville, to find his friend who entered his room with a strange face, and the same happened with the face of his lover, as they appeared like “devils” or “creatures in horror movies.”
Chara told CNN that he sees anyone’s ears as pointed, and faces in general appear pointy and distorted. He added: “I tried to explain to my roommate what I was seeing, but he thought I was crazy.” “I went out and saw all the faces distorted, and even now it happens to me.”
“It’s like staring at demons,” he continued. “Imagine waking up one morning, and suddenly everyone in the world looks like a creature from a horror movie.”
The man suffers from a rare condition called “prosopometamorphopsia” or “PMO,” which is a severe vision disorder that causes a person to see parts of people’s faces distorted in shape, color, or position, while the rest of the body parts remain as they are in their natural shape.
On Friday, The Lancet medical journal published research on his condition. Chara told CNN that he helped create a two-dimensional computer image of what he sees faces on, adding that there is “much more than that.”
He continued: “What people do not understand from the picture is that this distorted face that I see… moves, speaks, and makes gestures. It distances me from others, I try not to let that happen because I realize what I’m going through. However, I feel that I am no longer able to approach people as I used to.”
The CNN report indicated that some people with the disease “see faces turning into dragons, fish heads, or ears emerging from the top of some people’s heads,” and some patients stated that they see “eyes emerging from the skull or third eyes in the middle of people’s foreheads.”
Psychology professor Brad Duchene said, “The woman who saw dragons seemed to see them as a child, but there are cases in which the disease develops, as people grow up with the condition and do not realize that faces look different.”
Duchenne, the senior author of the study published in the Lancet, said that only 81 cases of PMO were present in their published references, according to a review published in June 2021, adding that it is likely that there are a much larger number of people suffering from the condition. .
He continued: “We have allocated a website so that people can learn about the disease, and we have received messages from at least 80 people so far. “People from all over the world are reporting the same symptoms without realizing that there are others with this disease.”
The American network explained that a person can develop this disease after a brain injury, tumor, infection, or after seizures such as epilepsy.
The doctoral student participating in the “Lancet” study, Antonio Melo, said that with the limited information available, many cases suffering from “PMO” disease can be diagnosed as “suffering from schizophrenia or any other condition that causes hallucinations, and they are given antipsychotic medications, or Even placing them in treatment institutions.”
Chara is currently working closely with laboratories and doctors, in order to mitigate the effect or treat the symptoms of the disease.
He explained that the new research represents “a means that may help save another person from misdiagnosis, by doctors who are not familiar with the rare disease,” noting that he “almost had to be admitted to a mental hospital” because of his condition.
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2024-03-26 20:34:52