Name that Disease! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Alzheimer's disease

Alois Alzheimer was working in the Frankfurt Asylum in 1901 when he came across a woman by the name of Auguste Deter. The 51-year-old patient presented with unusual behavioral symptoms - she was disoriented, suffered from short-term memory loss and experienced difficulty reading and writing.

These symptoms worsened over time, and eventually included a loss of higher mental functions and hallucinations. After the patient passed away, Alzheimer examined her brain, in which he observed neurofibrillar tangles as well as a thinning of the cerebral cortex.

He presented his findings at a conference for German psychiatrists in 1906, and called the illness "a peculiar disease of the cerebral cortex". It wasn't until 1910 that fellow psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described the condition as a distinctive disease and proposed that it be named after Alzheimer.

Some famous people who were afflicted with the illness include Ronald Reagan, Rita Hayworth, Charlton Heston and Terry Pratchett.

Answer: Down syndrome

Down syndrome was named for John Langdon Down, the British doctor who first described the disorder in 1862. In a paper published in 1866, Down identified a group of children who were in his care in Earlswook Asylum in Surrey, England, as having a distinct form of intellectual disability that caused them to share a common appearance, which he termed as "mongoloid". Down was adopting the racial classification system pioneered by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that was popular at the time, and probably never realized that his use of the term would spark a debate in the scientific community almost a century later. By 1959, the cause of the disorder had been identified by French geneticist Jérôme Lejeune as being due to the presence of an extra 21st chromosome, and by 1961, a group of geneticists petitioned a renowned medical journal to ask that the term "mongolism" be abandoned and replaced by something else, pointing out that "the increasing participation of Chinese and Japanese investigators in the study of the condition imposes on them the use of an embarrassing term".

The editors of "The Lancet" agreed, and supported the term "Down's syndrome". Today, references to "mongolism" are rare, with most textbooks and scientific journals adopting the non-possessive "Down syndrome" or "trisomy 21" to refer to the disease.

Answer: Hodgkin's disease

Thomas Hodgkin was working in Guy's Hospital Medical School in London when he identified the disease that now carries his name. A contemporary of Richard Bright and Thomas Addison (who also had diseases named after them), Hodgkin was 33 when he published a paper entitled "On Some Morbid Appearances of the Absorbent Glands and Spleen" in the Journal of the Medical and Surgical Society in London.

In his paper, Hodgkin described a disease in seven patients that caused enlargement of the lymph nodes and spleen, noting that contiguous lymph node groups were attacked in an orderly manner.

However, it took another 33 years before Hodgkin's name became associated with the condition. In 1865, Samuel Wilks, another Guy's Hospital physician, published a paper in which he described the same disease in greater detail, this time calling it "Hodgkin's disease" in recognition of Hodgkin's priority in identifying the condition. Today, the disease is treated with radiation and chemotherapy, with a survival rate of 90% or higher if caught early enough.

Some famous people who suffered from Hodgkin's disease include actor Richard Harris and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen.

Answer: Huntington's disease

George Huntington was the third in a line of physicians living on Long Island, New York. As a child, he accompanied his father on his rounds around East Hampton, which was when he witnessed first-hand the physical symptoms of this disease, which typically involves motor disturbances such as rapid and involuntary gesticulation of the limbs, trunk and face.

The affliction captured his attention, and he investigated the illness in his professional career as a physician. Benefiting from the notes made by his father and grandfather of patients afflicted with the condition, Huntington was the first to note the hereditary nature of the disease.

He wrote in his paper published in 1872: "When either or both the parents have shown manifestations of the disease, one or more of the offspring invariably suffer from the condition.

It never skips a generation to again manifest itself in another." The illness subsequently became known as Huntington's chorea or Huntington's disease.

Answer: Kaposi sarcoma

Moriz Kohn was born in 1837 in the village of Kaposvár, Hungary. In 1871, he was working as a dermatologist in Vienna when he converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and changed his surname to Kaposi, in reference to his birthplace. A year later, he published an account of a type of skin cancer he had observed, which he named "idiopathic multiple pigmented sarcoma of the skin".

The illness caused dark colored lesions to form on the skin, and occurred more often in patients who were taking immunosuppressive drugs.

It came to be known as Kaposi sarcoma. In the 1980s, KS became famous as an identifying symptom of AIDS due to the visible and distinctive lesions associated with the disease. In 1994, a group of virologists in New York isolated the cause of KS as a virus distinct from HIV, making KS an opportunistic infection that occurred in AIDS patients whose immune systems have been compromised.

Answer: Lou Gehrig's disease

ALS is sometimes known as Charcot's disease, after Jean-Martin Charcot, the French neurologist who first described the condition in 1869, but it is better known in the media as Lou Gehrig's disease, after the famed baseball player who succumbed to the disease in 1941. Gehrig played for the New York Yankees, and was halfway through the 1938 season when his performance began to suffer.

When his batting statistics dipped to an all-time low in 1939, Gehrig volunteered to bench himself "for the good of the team", ending a record-setting streak of 2,130 consecutive games which remained unbeaten for 56 years. Gehrig was subsequently diagnosed with ALS, and he retired from baseball in June 1939.

He remained active in his final days, distinguishing himself in public service until his death on June 2, 1941 at the age of 37. British actor David Niven, jazz legend Charlie Mingus and acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking were all also diagnosed with ALS, but so far none of their names have been associated with this debilitating illness in the same way that Gehrig's has.

Answer: Asperger syndrome

In 1944, Hans Asperger authored a report on a group of children who exhibited normal intellectual development, but who demonstrated "a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, one-sided conversation, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements". Asperger called the condition "autistic psychopathy", and it wasn't until many years later that it came to be referred to as Asperger syndrome.

The condition has since become merged with other conditions to form part of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Interestingly, Asperger himself appears to have possessed symptoms of the syndrome as a child - he was known to be a loner who had trouble making friends, and was intensely interested in languages. If Asperger did in fact have Asperger syndrome, it would mark a rare case of a condition that was named for a person who both identified and lived with the illness.

Answer: Marfan syndrome

In 1896, Antoine Marfan examined a five-year-old named Gabrielle and was struck by her disproportionately long limbs and fingers. Marfan called the condition "dolicostenomely" (Greek for slender-limbed) and used the term "pattes d'araignée" (spider's legs) to describe the patient's unusual physical characteristics when he presented his findings to the Société Médicale des Hôpitaux de Paris. Over time, other similar cases were reported, and the description of the condition was expanded to include defects of the cardiovascular system, lungs and eyes. By 1931, the condition was commonly referred to as Marfan's syndrome. If left undiagnosed and untreated, Marfan syndrome can result in sudden death, most commonly from a ruptured aorta. Such was the fate of Olympic volleyball medalist Flo Hyman and "Rent" composer Jonathan Larson. British composer Sir John Tavener has also been diagnosed with Marfan syndrome.

Answer: Parkinson's disease

In 1817, James Parkinson published "An Essay on the Shaking Palsy", which was to become his most enduring medical work. In it, Parkinson detailed the case histories of six patients who exhibited the classic symptoms of what was then known as "shaking palsy" or "paralysis agitans".

It wasn't until years after Parkinson's death that the condition came to be known as Parkinson's disease, a name adopted by Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1860s. A degenerative disease of the central nervous system, Parkinson's disease is characterized by a slowly spreading tremor, muscle rigidity, impaired speech and motor skills, and a characteristic gait.

Some famous people who have been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease include Michael J. Fox, Muhammad Ali and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Answer: Tourette's syndrome

The notorious disease that is characterized by physical and vocal tics was named after French physician Georges Albert Édouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette, who in 1885 wrote a detailed case study of nine patients who had the disease. Although the earliest case of the disease was reported in 1825, Tourette was the first to argue for a new clinical category to be created for the condition. Jean-Martin Charcot agreed, and named the illness "Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome", but over time it was commonly referred to as simply "Tourette's syndrome".

The illness has a stigma attached to it and remains largely misunderstood, due in large part to the numerous portrayals of the disease in movies and television, which often focus on the aspect of the disease that causes sufferers to exhibit involuntary swearing.

In truth, only about one in ten sufferers of Tourette's syndrome exhibit coprolalia. For a long time, the prevailing view was that Tourette's syndrome was a purely psychological condition, but recent studies have shown that it is likely a neurological condition brought about by genetic and environmental factors.