Medical Detectives: The Last Hope For Families Coping With Rare Diseases

"All over the country, specialized teams of doctors are giving hope to families who are desperately searching for a diagnosis."

"The medical sleuths, scattered across 12 clinics nationwide, form the Undiagnosed Disease Network. Since the program began in 2014, they've identified 31 previously unknown syndromes and they've cracked more than a third of their cases, according to a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine."

"'It was like Sherlock Holmes,' says Euan Ashley, a professor of medicine at Stanford University.' Patients would come with mystery diseases and we would try to solve them.'"

"Although rare diseases are individually very uncommon, collectively they are surprisingly pervasive. In fact, if grouped together into a single category, they afflict between 25 to 30 million Americans."

"For people coping with mystery conditions, finally getting a diagnosis can be life-saving or life-changing. Take the perplexing case of the two Miller boys from Marin County."