Physical Wellness

Woman's Random "Foot Orgasms" Baffle Medical Experts

By Christine Hsu | Update Date: Jun 28, 2013 06:34 PM EDT

A 55-year-old Dutch woman has developed a bizarre condition where she experiences orgasms that start in her foot.

The woman says she has orgasms five or six times a day, despite not having any sexual arousal or thoughts.

She says her sudden orgasms start from her feet, travel up her leg and end up at her genital area where they feel like orgasms experienced during sex.

Medical experts believe she is the only person in the world with the condition, according to LiveScience.

After conducting MRI scans on the woman's brain and foot, Dr. Marcel Waldinger, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands found no abnormalities.

However, additional tests revealed some differences between the nerves in the woman's left and right foot.

Waldinger said that when he stimulated the woman's foot with an electrical current, she immediately felt an orgasmic reaction in her foot.

Medical researchers, who published their findings in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, believe that the woman's foot orgasms are a result of a signaling mix-up in the woman's brain. Waldinger explained to LiveScience that about a year and a half before the woman started experiencing foot orgasms, she had developed a sepsis infection and spent three weeks in intensive care. She had gone into a coma and when she woke up she noticed a tingling sensation in her left foot.

 Researchers writing in the study believe the tingling sensation might have been caused by damage to the woman's nerve fibers in her foot.  They said the woman's foot orgasms developed because the nerve that delivers information from the foot reaches the spinal cord at the same point as the nerve that delivers information from the genital region. Researchers believe the woman's brain became unable to differentiate between the two regions because of nerve damage.

Eventually, doctors were able to stop the orgasms altogether by injecting anesthesia in one of the woman's spinal nerves. The woman has not had any symptoms for nearly a year.

Waldinger believes other people may suffer the condition. However, he says they may be too embarrassed to talk to their doctors about it.  In a previous case report, a man decided to have his foot amputated after having random foot orgasms.

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