A teenager who is unable to eat any food at all has a condition so rare that doctors said they haven’t found anyone else with the same ailment.
Finley Ranson, age 14, was born with an extreme response to all food, with his body reacting as if it was a virus and causing him to bleed internally.
“I’ve got a rare condition where I can’t have fat into my stomach,” the boy told news agency SWNS.
“It is impacting my life, as I’ve not been able to eat any food or drink other than water.”
The boy’s digestive system cannot tolerate lipids, which are fatty compounds or oils that are found in foods.
When Ranson, who is from England, was 4 years old, he was taken to a London hospital, “where a central line fed nutrients and minerals into his heart,” his mother said.
“It was a game-changer. He was happy, bouncing and starting to put on weight.”
Finley now regularly receives the lipid infusions via a tube, which enters his chest and goes to the central vein in his heart.
He receives carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals three times a day into his stomach via a different tube.
He started undergoing the six-hour process every week when he was 4 years old.
For the past five years, it has been twice a week.
“We have to bypass the gastrointestinal tract completely,” Dr. Manas Datta, a pediatrician who has treated Finley since birth, told the BBC.
Doctors tried introducing separate ingredients from the tube into the boy’s stomach, but “as soon as they put the lipid in, we took 10 steps back,” the boy’s mother, Rhys Ranson, told SWNS.
Ranson’s condition is so rare that it doesn’t even have a name, although he has dubbed it “Finley-itis.”
His condition has baffled medical professionals, who believe he may be one of the only people whose body reacts to lipids in this way.
“That’s the unfortunate thing that we bump up against in medicine with rare diseases that confound doctors,” Dr. Neeta Ogden, an allergist and immunologist in Edison, New Jersey, who is not involved in Ranson’s care, told Fox News Digital.
Dr. Stephen Tilles, an allergy and immunology specialist in Seattle, told Fox News Digital that Ranson’s condition is not the sort of thing typically associated with a food allergy.
“Obviously, it’s an adverse reaction to the lipid component of food, but that’s not on the list of things that allergists will encounter in their practices,” said Tilles, who is also unaffiliated with Ranson’s care.
Doctors originally believed Ranson might be allergic to breast milk, but after being fed hypoallergenic milk through a tube, he still failed to thrive, his mother reported.
“His stools were all blood and mucus, and he wouldn’t put on weight” when he was a baby, Rhys Ranson told SWNS.
She is now being trained to perform the lipid infusions at home, which she hopes will improve her son’s quality of life.
“We’re unsure what the future looks like,” she said.
“We hope there’s a day that comes [when] he can have a normal diet … but if not, as long as Finley’s happy and healthy and thriving the way he is, we’re happy to continue what life is like for us at the moment.”
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