Rapidly Aging Kids

Aug. 8, 2006 — -- For the first nine months of Sam Berns' life, everything seemed normal. He learned to walk, but his parents noticed something was different.

"Something was wrong," remembers his mother, Leslie Gordon. "I kept saying, you know, there's something going on, there's something going on. Maybe at first it was just a feeling more than anything."

It seemed Sam's growth had slowed dramatically. After a year, doctors ultimately diagnosed him with a genetic disease so rare that it affects just one in 8,000,000 children. Only 40 children in the world are known to have the disease.

The disease, progeria, ages children at up to 10 times the normal rate. They stop growing prematurely, then lose their hair and get arthritis. Some children suffer strokes by the time they are 4 or 5. There is no known treatment or cure, and most patients die of heart disease by the age of 13.

For Sam's parents — both doctors who understood the significance of the diagnosis — the news was devastating.

"I'm trained in pediatric emergency medicine," his father, Scott Berns, tells "Primetime." "My mind-set is to go in and to help and to fix things. And now we're told we have a diagnosis of progeria and there's nothing you can do about it. Your son's going to die."

They were determined to do something. Gordon devoted herself full-time to researching her son's disease. She soon learned that there is almost no information about the disease, and no organization fighting for the kids who have it.

Berns and Gordon created a nonprofit organization, the Progeria Research Foundation, to collect information about the disease and raise money to fund research.

Progeria — which gets its name from the Greek for "prematurely old" — is a gene mutation. But scientists had not identified which gene or genes were responsible for the disease, so they had no idea how to start hunting for a cure.