Heart Brad Pitt's disease for which he lives a nightmare when he meets an acquaintance

The actor publicly commented in 2013 that he suffers from a rare disease with a hard-to-pronounce name: prosopagnosia. It was during an interview for Esquire magazine, when the man from Oklahoma recognized this peculiar health problem and the harsh social situations he is subjected to because of it: "There are people who hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them" , lament.

It is unknown if Brad Pitt achieved with that confession that all those people forgive him, what he certainly did achieve was putting a rare disease on the map (it affects 2.5 percent of the world's population). Apparently, according to a study carried out at the University of Dartmouth, United States, prosopagnosia has its genesis in a neurobiological problem in the brain that widely affects visual recognition.

This disease is so extremely striking that a prestigious channel like the BBC has addressed it in several reports in recent years. In one of them, Boo James, a resident of Cardiff, explained that she once saw a strange woman greet her on the bus. She later realized it was her own mother: "It's really hard. It can be physically and emotionally draining to spend a day in public constantly wondering if you should have talked to someone."

Use this example of a person with less popularity than Brad Pitt to assess the tremendous social problem and the generation of stress that this disease entails for all those who suffer from it.

No treatment

Another piece of bad news for all his patients is that there is no specific treatment for this disease. The only remedy for which health professionals bet is to train people who suffer from prosopagnosia so that they can recognize some aspects of the physiognomy of their closest people, such as hair, voice or the use of certain jewelry.

The only thing that is recommended to anyone who feels that they may suffer from this disorder is to go to a neurologist, where a CT scan and an MRI are normally performed, especially to rule out other possible pathologies.

In the cases cited above, experts frame them within congenital prosopagnosia, which is determined by a hereditary genetic component. In turn, it is divided into two types: apperceptive, in which the patient is not able to differentiate one face from another; and associative, where he would distinguish some features but would not be able to associate them with those of someone he knew, as happens, for example, Brad Pitt.

There is also acquired prosopagnosia, as a consequence of different diseases such as cerebral hemorrhages, cerebral atrophy or Alzheimer's disease.

[More information: Angelina Jolie, on her divorce: "I did not recognize what I had become"]

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