A few days after a 4-year-old boy in Japan recovered from an upper respiratory infection, human faces started to look wrong to him. In the portraits he brought to his doctors, faces, ears, and hair were stretched out, both horizontally and vertically.
Pediatricians at Tokyo Medical University diagnosed prosopometamorphopsia, a rare disorder in which faces appear distorted even though nothing about them has changed. In a case report published February 3 in Cureus, they describe it as, to their knowledge, the first reported case combining early childhood onset with a possible infectious trigger.
