Helene Stapinski describes a time when her daughter had a headache, and she realized she had experienced the same condition when she was a young girl.
Here is a part of her story….
A few months ago, my 10-year old daughter, Paulina was suffering from a bad headache right before bedtime. She went to lie down and I sat beside her stroking her head. After a few minutes, she looked up at me and said, “Everything in the room looks really small.”
And I suddenly remembered: When I was young, I too would “see things far away,” as I once described it to my mother – as if everything in the room were at the wrong end of a telescope.
I asked Paulina if this was the first time she had experienced such a thing. She shook her head and said it happened every now and then. When I was a little girl, I told her, it would happen to me when I had a fever or was nervous. I told her not to worry and that it would go away on its own.
Soon she fell asleep, and I ran straight to my computer. Within minutes, I discovered that there was an actual name for what turns out to be a very rare affliction- Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
Episodes usually include micropsia, objects appear small, or macropsia, objects appear large. Some sufferers perceive their own body parts to be larger or smaller. For me, and Paulina, furniture a few feet away seemed small enough to fit inside a dollhouse.
Dr. John Todd, a British psychiatrist, gave the disorder its name in a 1955 paper, noting that the misperceptions resemble Lewis Carroll’s descriptions of what happened to Alice. It’s also known as Todd’s syndrome.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is not an optical problem or hallucination. Instead, it is most likely caused by a change in a portion of the brain, likely the parietal lobe, that processes perceptions of the environment. Some specialists consider it a type of aura, a sensory warning preceding a migraine.
Dr. Grant Liu a pediatric neuro-opthalmologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said his research into the syndrome shows that even small changes to the brain can yield dramatic effects. When those areas involved in determining size, shape and distance malfunction, he said, “the resulting visual experience can be extraordinary.”
Dr. Liu recently examined and interviewed 48 patients, all of them who had the syndrome as children. Thirty-three percent of the cases were traced to some sort of infection, 6% to migraine and another 6% to head trauma. In about half the cases, however no cause was found.
A quarter of the subjects with no migraine history eventually developed migraines. In addition, 40% were still experiencing symptoms. Dr. Liu said it took time for family members of those studied to admit that they too had the syndrome, which leads him to believe that it may be more widespread than people think.
“A lot of family members didn’t own up to it on the first-go-round,” he said. “They were almost too embarrassed. People want to be told that they’re not crazy.”
6/23/15