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What causes a migraine? What's really happening in the brain of a schizophrenic person? What's the story behind the mysterious New Brunswick syndrome? On today's episode of The List Show, we're talking about medical mysteries that have yet to be solved. It turns out, we don't know everything about the human body yet. Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1 About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Discord: https://discord.io/mentalfloss Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss 6 Medical Mysteries | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
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If you were a sailor up until the mid-1700s, the likelihood was good that you'd come down
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with scurvy, which led to spongy gums, joint pain, and spontaneous bleeding during your
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time at sea, and no one could figure out why. That sort of changed in the 1740s, when a Scottish doctor set up the first-ever clinical
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trial to discover a treatment for scurvy. He gave six pairs of sailors various substances, like vinegar or citrus fruit
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Over time, the pair getting oranges and lemons improved far more dramatically than the others
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Mystery solved? Not quite yet. be until the 1920s that scientists found the real cause of the disease, vitamin C deficiency
0:34
It turned out that the scorbutic sailors had eaten only processed food that didn't contain
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vitamin C, and once they replenished it with fresh fruit, they were cured
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But a lot of other medical mysteries remain unsolved. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, Editor-in-Chief of Mental Floss
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Let's take a look at a few, from the mechanisms of migraines to the very real issues behind
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mass hysteria. Let's get started. People have been suffering from migraines for thousands of years, and strange cures for
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the condition have been around just as long. One Roman physician recommended shocks from an electric fish to zap away headaches, and
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migraines were likely included in that. The Swiss doctor, who first distinguished migraines in medical literature, suggested
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good old bloodletting to relieve the pain. Doctors were clearly willing to try anything to treat migraine sufferers, but the one thing
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they couldn't do is pinpoint the cause of the disease. aren't just bad headaches. The excruciating head pain comes with additional symptoms like nausea
1:32
visual disturbances, sensitivity to light and sound, and even temporary loss of motor function
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The medical consensus now is that migraines are a result of abnormal brain activity. But
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what that really means is still vague. Migraines usually appear between age 10 and 45, and people
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often report something triggering their onset, such as stress, exercise, loud noises, or other
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stimulants. Researchers think that these triggers may launch disruptive signals in the brain that
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affect blood flow to the organ and surrounding muscles, resulting in the characteristic pain
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and sensory distortions. The reasons why certain triggers have that ability and how the brain
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reacts to them on a molecular level are still being intensively studied. For now, people who
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experience migraines can take prescription medications that either prevent them or stop
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them once they start. Another medical mystery affecting younger people is the increase in
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colorectal cancer While this type of cancer which affects the large intestines is still most common among older adults rates are skyrocketing in people in their 20s 30s and 40s In those age groups
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prevalence has jumped from 8.6 cases to nearly 13 cases per 100,000 people. Those aged 40 to 49 had
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an even bigger spike. It's becoming the leading cause of cancer deaths in young adults in the U.S
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What's really strange is that at the same time, colorectal cancer rates have dropped dramatically
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in older adults, though at least some of that is down to increased screening
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Some known risk factors, like your age, genetic history, and lifestyle habits
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can raise your risk for developing colorectal cancer, but they don't fully explain the widespread
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increase in people under 55. A few recent studies have suggested that disruption to the gut
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microbiome may also be an indicator of a higher risk. A healthy microbiome contains a mix of
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bacteria, fungi, and viruses that work together to maintain your health. That balance can be
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upended by a lot of things. Poor diet, infection, acute or chronic illness, environmental factors
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medications, stress, the list goes on. One or more of these might be associated with
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the increase in early onset colorectal cancer. More research is needed, as they say
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While scientists do have a pretty good idea of what causes most cancers
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neurological illnesses can be much harder to parse. We don't know what causes schizophrenia
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for example. This complex disease presents a constellation of symptoms ranging from paranoia
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sensory hallucinations and delusions to physical tremors and movement disorders. Researchers think that a combination of genetic and environmental factors increases a person's
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chances for developing schizophrenia. More than 100 genes are linked to schizophrenia risk
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but it's not a situation in which a single gene can cause or prevent it
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Instead, these genes probably exhibit tiny mutations that add up to a higher risk of the
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disease. And the mutations can occur at different times during a person's brain development
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Those tweaks can also interact with other health experiences, like prenatal infections, or severe stress at a young age that are thought to increase one's risk
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That makes it exceedingly hard to pinpoint one cause or stage of growth that would lead to
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schizophrenia. The connections between all these dots are not yet clear. While we don't know its
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cause or have a cure, there are medicines and treatment strategies that can help people manage
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the condition. A newer medical mystery emerged in New Brunswick, Canada in 2015. Several residents
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began exhibiting symptoms ranging from delusions, memory loss, and hallucinations, to limb spasms
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balance problems, and vision issues. In many of the cases their cognitive and physical decline plateaued at a certain point but some died Doctors initially believed they had Creutzfeldt disease or CJD a fatal neurological disorder caused by misfolded brain proteins called prions
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Then some of the patients consulted with a neurologist named Dr. Allie Marrero
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for additional tests, and ysis of their tissue came back negative for CJD
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More men and women of all ages and backgrounds turned up at Dr. Marrero's office with the same
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set of inexplicable symptoms. A panel of public health officials evaluated the initial cases and
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could not agree on a cause. They dubbed it the New Brunswick Neurological Syndrome of Unknown
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Etiology. Patients filled out extensive questionnaires, and scientists investigated potential environmental, genetic, or foodborne toxicants. But then, according to the New York
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Times, efforts to determine the syndrome's cause stalled. Some doctors maintain that the syndrome
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doesn't seem to really exist as a distinct diagnosis, and the people have established
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conditions like Alzheimer's or traumatic brain injury or things like that. Marrero counters
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that these studies and results are small scale, make claims bigger than they actually prove
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and even if it is an established condition, there has to be something underpinning the
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rising cases. We may get more clues to the mystery soon, though. The New Brunswick
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government is yzing data from 222 of Dr. Marrero's patients and will make the results
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available to researchers and the public, along with recommendations for the next phases of
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investigation. Unfortunately, officials told the CBC that it's still too early to identify a cause
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or potential treatments. In another localized medical mystery, health officials have named a
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wide variety of potential causes of the perplexing Havana Syndrome, from innocent insects to secret
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Russian microwaves. The physics kind, not the ovens. The illness first appeared in 2016 among
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government employees and their families stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba. They reported
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hearing high-pitched sounds at night. Then they experienced dizziness, blurred vision, extreme
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headaches, and ringing in the ears, and even cognitive and sensory impairment. The media dubbed
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Havana Syndrome, though intelligence officials call it a collection of anomalous health incidents
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or AHIs. Several government agencies in the US and Cuba launched investigations without conclusive
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results, which has led to a lot of theories about the syndrome's origins. A 2022 review of the
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scientific literature suggested that a likely cause was pulsed radio frequency energy, which can be
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used as a weapon, though one ysis found the sound could have been a side effect of poorly
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thought-out surveillance efforts. Other suggested causes were functional disorders among the patients
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mass psychogenic illness or exposure to neurotoxins or chemical agents Some of the affected employees believe it a Russian military operation using a non sonic weapon to disable US intelligent gathering A group of government science advisors suggested the source of the high sounds was insects
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specifically the Indy short-tailed cricket. Other clues just add to the syndrome's complexity
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As of 2024, about 334 Americans are or were being treated for the syndrome, but incidence
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is not confined to Cuba. of piercing sounds and cognitive disturbances have been reported in at least 10 countries
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including the US. And while the patients share neurological symptoms, a 2024 NIH report found
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no MRI-detectable brain injury or biological abnormalities among Havana syndrome patients when compared to scans of healthy people
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We just mentioned that mass psychogenic illness could be at the root of Havana syndrome. But
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mass psychogenic illness itself is somewhat of a medical mystery. The history books are
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are filled with incidents in which a group of people begins to act in the same bizarre
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way, or says they saw the same imaginary thing, or manifest the same idiopathic symptoms
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Some people refer to the phenomenon as conversion disorder or mass hysteria, while others argue
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those are different. One of the strangest examples is the Dancing Plague of 1518
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A villager in Strasbourg, France suddenly started dancing in the town square and couldn't stop
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Hundreds of people started experiencing the same unconscious urge to dance. Some danced until they dropped dead of a heart attack or sheer exhaustion
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The plague lasted for months. Many historians also consider the witch trials in Europe and Colonial America to be mass
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psychogenic events. Typically, the incident started with a group of people who began acting erratically and
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or accused someone of causing the attacks. In the infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts in 1692, some preteen girls began writhing
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and screaming and accused three women of bewitching them. The alarming situation snowballed
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and wives accused each other of witchcraft, neighbors informed on neighbors, and children
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condemned their parents. Eventually, 19 people were hanged. These days, mass psychogenic events are generally not witchcraft-related, but they still occur
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They happen most often during times of high stress in the immediate community
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As recently as 2011, more than a dozen girls at a high school in Leroy, New York came down
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with unexplained tics and twitches. And in 2016, social media was rife with posts about
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creepy clowns committing violent acts in random towns with very little actual evidence. Both
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incidents exhibited characteristics of mass psychogenic illness. That's it for this episode
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of The List Show. If only Dr. House were real and could help us solve some of these mysteries
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Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time
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