Tiny Brain No Obstacle To French Civil Servant

French researchers have reported that a man with an unusually tiny brain has managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull.

Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber, known as a ventricle, took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.

The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg. When hospital staff took his medical history, they learned he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away water on the brain as an infant.

The shunt was removed when he was 14. So the researchers did CT and MRI scans. They were astonished to see "massive enlargement" of the usually tiny chambers that hold the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain.

"He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr. Lionel Feuillet wrote in a letter to a medical journal.

Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled, either.

"What I find amazing to this day is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be compatible with life," they said. "If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side."

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