LAST NIGHT’s TV – The Boy Who Looks Like an Old Man

By STEVE PRATT

Bodyshock: The 80-Year-Old Children (C4)

ALI has thinning hair, arthritis and his brittle bones are becoming weaker and weaker. The sad thing is that this little Indian boy is only seven years old. His parents, Bisul and Rajia, can only watch as the youngster turns into an old man before their eyes.

Even worse for the Khan family is that five of their seven children suffer from the same rare disease, progeria. Two of them have already died.

The condition has been featured in at least one previous documentary. Bodyshock went further by focusing on a whole family with the disease, an extraordinary situation when you consider there are only 42 cases known to exist worldwide.

Sufferers are usually found in isolation.

There’s a one in four million chance of a child having the disease. This family, from a remote Indian village, has the dubious distinction of being the only family in the world with more than one child with progeria.

There was a point to the Bodyshock programme other than to expose to a wider public this particular illness. It showed how the Khan children were being used to try to help others with progeria.

Dr Chandon Chattopadhyay has championed the cause of the progeria children, continuing the good work that his grandmother did alongside Mother Teresa.

The Khans have two children unaffected by the disease. The three surviving are “a unique experiment of nature”. He hopes a comprehensive sets of tests over three days will help understand the disease and enable him to offer help for their future.

Kramul is 19 and his sister Rehana is 17.

Both have lived longer than other progeria children. Most die by the time they’re 13, with a few surviving into their late 20s.

The children have the same hopes and fears of any teenagers, even if going out in public is, as their father said, a circus because of the way they look.

They must realise how ill they are but Kramul says thoughtfully: “We don’t wish other children’s parents to cry. We don’t want other children to suffer.”

The results of the tests showed they have healthy hearts, possibly because malnutrition stopped them developing heart disease.

That’s good as most progeria suffers die from cardiac problems.

But doctors found their crumbling bones were in a worse state than expected. The smallest infection could prove fatal.

Researchers worldwide are looking for a cure. A cancer drug seems to offer some hope. It may be too late for Kramul and Rehana but, for younger brother Ali, time may be on his side.

The children were taken on a boat trip for the first time as a reward for undergoing the tests. Their joy at the treat made for a bittersweet ending to the documentary – seeing them so happy but knowing time was short.