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Brooke Greenberg (born August 1, 1993), is an American from Reisterstown, Maryland, who has remained physically and cognitively similar to a toddler, despite her increasing age. She is about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighs about 16 pounds (7.3 kg), and has an estimated mental age of nine months to one year. Brooke’s doctors have termed her condition “Syndrome X”. Brooke was born on August 1, 1993 to Jewish parents Melanie and Howard Greenberg at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, one month before her due date, weighing just four pounds (1.8 kg). She was born with anterior hip dislocation, a condition which caused her legs to be swiveled upwards toward her shoulders; this was corrected surgically. Otherwise, Brooke appeared to be a normal infant. In her first six years, Brooke Greenberg went through a series of unexplained medical emergencies from which she recovered. She had seven perforated stomach ulcers. She also suffered aseizure. This was followed by what was later diagnosed as a stroke; weeks later, no damage was detected. At age five, Brooke had a mass in her brain that caused her to sleep for 14 days. The doctors diagnosed the mass as a brain tumor. However, Brooke later awoke, and physicians found no tumor present. Brooke’s pediatrician, Dr. Lawrence Pakula, states that the source of her sudden illness remains a mystery.Brooke Greenberg (born August 1, 1993), is an American from Reisterstown, Maryland, who has remained physically and cognitively similar to a toddler, despite her increasing age. She is about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighs about 16 pounds (7.3 kg), and has an estimated mental age of nine months to one year. Brooke’s doctors have termed her condition “Syndrome X”.
Brooke was born on August 1, 1993 to Jewish parents Melanie and Howard Greenberg at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, one month before her due date, weighing just four pounds (1.8 kg). She was born with anterior hip dislocation, a condition which caused her legs to be swiveled upwards toward her shoulders; this was corrected surgically. Otherwise, Brooke appeared to be a normal infant. In her first six years, Brooke Greenberg went through a series of unexplained medical emergencies from which she recovered. She had seven perforated stomach ulcers. She also suffered aseizure. This was followed by what was later diagnosed as a stroke; weeks later, no damage was detected. At age five, Brooke had a mass in her brain that caused her to sleep for 14 days. The doctors diagnosed the mass as a brain tumor. However, Brooke later awoke, and physicians found no tumor present. Brooke’s pediatrician, Dr. Lawrence Pakula, states that the source of her sudden illness remains a mystery.
During an interview on the talk show Katie, her father stated that between the ages of four and five she stopped growing. Over the past several years, the Greenbergs have visited many specialists, looking for an explanation for their daughter’s strange condition, yet there has been no diagnosis of any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality. In 2001, when Dateline documented Brooke, she was still the size of a six-month-old infant, weighing just 13 lb (5.9 kg) at 27 inches (69 cm) tall. The family still had no explanation. Brooke Greenberg’s mother Melanie said, “They [the specialists] just said she’ll catch up. Then we went to the nutritionist, the endocrinologist. We tried the growth hormone…”. The growth hormone treatment had no effect. Howard, Brooke’s father, said: “I mean she did not put on an ounce or she did not grow an inch … That’s when I knew there was a problem.” After the growth hormone administration failed, the doctors, unable to diagnose a known condition, named her condition Syndrome X. The Greenbergs made many visits to nearby Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, and even took Brooke to New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, searching for information about their daughter’s condition. When geneticists sequenced Greenberg’s DNA, they found that the genes associated with the premature aging diseases were normal, unlike the mutated versions in patients withWerner syndrome and progeria.
