HEALTH GOSSIP: Here is a child who looks 8 times his age...

   A 14-year-old boy who has the body of a 110-year-old could die in the next few years due to a rare disease which makes him age eight times faster than normal.

   The Daily Mail reports Ali Hussain Khan, from Bihar in India, suffers from Progeria which causes rapid ageing and affects just 80 people worldwide.

   The teenager, whose parents are first cousins, has seen five of his siblings die from the same condition.
Although sufferers are not expected to live much beyond the age of 14, Ali refuses to give up hope. "I very much want to live and I hope there is medicine for my condition out there. I'm not scared of death but my parents have suffered a lot," Ali said.

   "I'd love to live much longer for them. I don't want to burden them with any more pain."

   His siblings Rehana, Iqramul, Gudiya and Rubina have all died from Progeria between the ages of 12 and 24.

   A fifth child, a boy who died within 24 hours of being born, is also thought to have had the rare condition.

   Ali's father Nabi Hussain Khan, 50, said he would have stopped having children had doctors diagnosed the disease earlier.

   "We never heard of the word Progeria, the doctors never mentioned it. They were stabbing in the dark; they were as clueless as us," Hussain Kahn, who also has two healthy daughters, said.

   "If a doctor had perhaps told us that our children were suffering with some kind of genetic problem and we were connected we would've stopped having children. But nothing was said."
   Many children with Progeria suffer from joint pain and hip
osteoarthritis.