Brooke was born on January 8, 1993, to Jewish[1][3] parents Howard and Melanie Greenberg[4] at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. She was delivered by Caesarian section, one month before her due date due to "intermittent growth",[5] weighing just four pounds (1.8 kg). She was born with anterior hip dislocation, a condition that caused her legs to be swiveled upward toward her shoulders; it was corrected surgically. Otherwise, Brooke appeared to be a normal infant.[6] She was the third of four girls born to her parents.In her first six years, she went through a series of unexplained medical emergencies from which she recovered. She had seven perforated stomach ulcers. She also suffered a seizure. This was followed by what was later diagnosed as a stroke; weeks later, no damage was detected. At age five, Brooke had a mass in her brain that caused her to go into a deep sleep (after confirmation that it was not a coma) for 14 days. The doctors diagnosed the mass as a brain tumor. She later awoke, and physicians found no tumor present. Brooke's pediatrician, Dr. Lawrence Pakula, states that the source of her sudden illness remains a mystery.During an interview on the talk show Katie, her father stated that between the ages of four and five, she stopped growing.[8] Child Frozen In Time, a documentary about Brooke,[5] was first broadcast on TLC on August 9, 2009.In 2009, Walker said, "There've been very minimal changes in Brooke's brain … Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected."[7] Walker noted that Brooke's brain, for example, was not much more mature than that of a newborn infant. He estimated her mental age at around nine months to a year old. Brooke could make gestures and recognize sounds but could not speak. Her bones were like those of a ten-year-old, and she still had her baby teeth, which had an estimated developmental age of about eight years. Said Walker, "We think that Brooke's condition presents us with a unique opportunity to understand the process of aging."[13] "Different parts of her body are developing at different rates, as if they were not a unit but parts of separate organisms," Walker explained.[1] Dr. Walker did not say whether the genes responsible for development are the same ones responsible for aging.Dr. Walker believed that Brooke Greenberg's condition had resulted from a failure of central control genes. He identified two more people with similar developmental issues: Gabrielle Williams[15] of Montana (born in 2004) and Nicky Freeman[16] of Australia (born in 1970), a 46-year-old man who looks like a preteen boy.Gabrielle Williams's condition has since been determined to have been the result of a genetic mutation. Nicky Freeman has been diagnosed with deformity of the pituitary gland. María Audenete do Nascimento, a Brazilian woman who lives in the town of Caucaia near Fortaleza in the state of Ceará, Brazil, was once thought to have also been suffering from a condition similar to Greenberg's. She was reportedly born in May 1981 but stopped growing after nine months.[17] She has been diagnosed with severe hypothyroidism.In May 2015, it was reported that Layla Qualls of Oklahoma looks like she is 9 or 10 months old, but is 3 years old. She is among seven children worldwide with Syndrome X that are being studied by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. In their ongoing research they found that the blood of Syndrome X children appears to age normally.
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