You Named It After Me? Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Addison's disease is a disorder of the adrenal glands, situated just above the kidneys, which fail to create a sufficient level of hormones. The condition is named for a British doctor named Thomas Addison who identified the illness in 1855. The disease has no cure but is managed by giving hormone supplements.

Named for Dr Harry Angelman, who was working in Warrington in England at the time, Angelman's syndrome is a genetic disorder which affects the nervous system. Children fail to develop language, movement is difficult and patients may suffer from seizures. Although Angelman described the condition in 1965 it wasn't named for him until 1982 when physicians in America recognised his early description of the condition.

Bright's disease is an earlier name for the illness now called nephritis, meaning an inflammation of the kidney. It was named for an English doctor named Richard Bright who first described the symptoms in 1827.

Stephen Christmas is the source of the name for the disease bearing his name, which is a form of haemophilia known as Haemophilia B. Stephen was diagnosed in 1952 and became the first patient known to have this rare form of haemophilia.

Cushing's syndrome is caused by having too much of a hormone called cortisol in the body. It is usually caused by taking certain steroid medications although it can be caused by growths on the endocrine glands. It is named for Harvey Cushing, an American surgeon who described the condition in 1912.

Named for the British doctor John Langdon Down, who described the condition in 1866, Down's syndrome is caused by a genetic disorder. Sufferers have an extra copy of chromosome 21, giving the condition the alternative name of Trisomy 21.

The disease in which the body's immune system attacks the thyroid, resulting in an under-production of hormones, is named for Dr. Hakaru Hashimoto, a Japanese doctor who identified the condition in 1912.

Huntington's disease is one inherited from a parent and causes damage to the parts of the brain which control movement, thinking and memory. It was first described in 1872 by an American doctor called George Huntington.

Ménière's disease affects the ears causing vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss and issues with balance. Prosper Ménière was the French doctor who first put forward the theory. in 1861, that the symptoms arose from issues with the inner ear rather than the brain.

The British surgeon and pathologist James Paget has quite a few medical conditions named for him, including an abscess and a specific type of breast cancer, but the most important one is a bone disease which is usually referred to as Paget's disease of the bone for clarity. The disease involves a failure of the bones to repair and regenerate, causing them to deform, and Paget described the condition in 1877.

Parkinson's disease is a neurological condition with the most noticeable symptom being a continuous tremor. It usually affects older people, fifty or over, and is caused by a reduction of dopamine production following the loss of certain brain cells. The name comes from James Parkinson who described what he called the 'shaking palsy' in 1817.

Tourette's syndrome is a neurological condition which involves involuntary movements, physical and vocal, called tics. Blinking the eyes and shrugging shoulders are typical of the involuntary physical manifestations while vocal tics can mean repeating words or grunting. Shouting inappropriate words is much rarer than generally believed. The first medical account of the condition came in 1885 in a publication by a French neurologist named Georges Gilles de la Tourette.

Named for a German doctor named Adolf Weil, the disease named for him is a severe type of leptospirosis, where the infection spreads to the organs such as kidneys and the liver, causing jaundice. It is contracted from contaminated water and, often, carried in rat urine.

The incorrect options are Bismarck, who was a German chancellor and has no illnesses named for him. There is no Carter's syndrome, although former US President Jimmy Carter is remembered for his work towards eliminating Guinea worm disease. Lincoln's syndrome doesn't exist either, although Abraham Lincoln is thought to have suffered from Marfan syndrome. Standish disease is another creation, based on the name of a hospital where I spent a birthday many years ago. Finally, Manfred von Richthofen, the World War l flying ace, did not lend his name to any medical condition. There are two real diseases with similar names, though - von Willebrand's disease and von Recklinghausen's disease.

Finding names which did not have a medical condition attached to them was harder than I expected, but it is rare these days for diseases to be named for a particular person.