An 8-year-old girl named Gabby Williams reportedly still has the skin of a newborn baby and she is still dependent on her mother, needing diapers, cradling, and feeding.
The Montana girl only weighs 11 pounds, and doctors are trying to evaluate her mysterious condition but are unsure what causes her disorder, reported ABC News.
Mary Margret Williams, her mother, told the broadcaster: “Gabrielle hasn’t changed since pretty much forever. She has gotten a little longer and we have jumped into putting her in size 3-6 month clothes instead of 0-3 months for the footies.”
“Last time we weighed her she was up a pound to 11 pounds and she’s gotten a few more haircuts,” she added. “Other than that, she hasn’t changed much since the [2012] show.”
A doctor has been looking into the cause of the disorder, seeking to find the so-called “genetic off-switch.”
The disorder is shared only by a few other people across the world, including a 29-year-old Florida man who has the body of a 10-year-old child, and a 31-year-old woman who is the size of a 2-year-old.
“In some people, something happens to them and the development process is retarded,” medical researcher Richard F. Walker told ABC. “The rate of change in the body slows and is negligible.”
“If we could identify the gene and then at young adulthood we could silence the expression of developmental inertia, find an off-switch, when you do that, there is perfect homeostasis and you are biologically immortal,” Walker told ABC News. The “biological immortality,” he said, could help people deal with the normal effects of the aging process.
Mary Margret Williams, however, doesn’t see eye to eye with medical research on her daughter.
“There was some concern,” she told ABC. “We are good Catholics, God-fearing people and we believe we are meant to get old—the process of life—and meant to die.”
In the case of the Brazilian woman, who is named Maria Audete do Nascimento, local medical experts believe that she suffers from an extreme deficiency of the thyroid hormone. As a result, her body was not able to develop mentally or physically, according to a local report.
