Unraveling the Unseen Threads: Our Blog and Q&A Database

A young man of 56 yrs, living with his brother, and devoid of any previous important health issue, faced a severe and acute episode of dyspnea. A new hospital admission documented a complete right bundle branch block, as well as an S1Q3T3 pattern. Also, a right ventricular overload was apparent from the negative T waves in V1-V3.

Due to an important hypoxemia, a contrast-enhanced computed tomography was taken, which, in succession, returned a picture of a severe pulmonary thromboembolism, with an almost occluding embolus in the proximal right pulmonary artery.

This condition, happening more than six month before our evaluation, was apparently unexplainable. Indeed, taken to our visit due to secondary right ventricular dysfunction, the young man was seemingly devoid of any other thrombotic risk factor. A total-body TC had excluded any feared primary or repetitive neoplastic process. Similarly, no thrombofilic condition had been present in his whole family, or even in his previous clinical history. No dyslipidemia or diabetes, no hypertension, no sedentary posture, nor recent traumatic episodes, nor fractures. By in-depth investigating his clinical history, only an inedited circumstantial factor was apparent: the man, living with a completely healthy brother, had only an occupational peculiar exposure: he had been working with horses in the last twenty years.

The hypothesis that a zoonotic infection had promoted or favoured the thrombotic appearance emerged imperiously on the scene, though not yet proved, as it came early to our attention, when we had not realized that cysticercosis could have such a so high spreading.

A district in Rome, third through fourth in the city ranking, for number of inhabitants, among all the existing neighbourhoods, has shown a very high rate of disabilities. 

In particular, and at least since the last two decades, people over the age of 65-70 yrs have been increasingly requiring walkers to deambulate, or are increasingly restricted to bed. No less than 30-40 new slow pacers have been increasingly recognised in the district, per year. No more than 6-10 years have been observed to elapse before their death.

If we have observed this type of temporal relation, the motility impairment before and the vascular events later, former articles, published in 2018  (Di Filippo A), from data derived from the whole Italian territory on the relationship between less refined and more generic socio-economic deprivation indicators, and the drugs' consumption for diabetes and hypertension, seemed to confirm the causal direction, by tertiles of deprivation. The paper did not seem, however, to glimpse and foresee any possible disease-related pathogenetic link between the deprivation condition and the increased drugs' consumption, as we, conversely, are certain of having detected and confirmed, with ex-juvantibus and ex-nocentibus proofs. 

Consistently, also increasing rates of hypertension (according to data on relative drug consumption as per pharmaceutical systematized data), and of ischemic heart disease, vascular disease, and even neurodegenerative diseases, are reported. 

We wonder whether the testified link between gestational hypertension and epilepsy in the newborn (Xue B, JCI 2025) could represent a proof-of-concept of the consistency of spread cysticercosis mediating both of them. A similar condition could be the basis of the documented 7-fold higher risk of hypertension in children with epilepsy arising before the age of 5 yrs (Moll JC, Children 2025).