It's a tragic business--I noticed when I read the article that one of the doctors said she was aging, but that the aging process was 'out of sync'. It occurred to me that she could be suffering from a very basic fault with the homeobox genes. The hox genes determine the physical makeup of the different parts of the body--skin colour, hairyness, limb-length etc. There must be a mechanism in normal growth by which the different parts of the body all age at the same pace, and there must be genes that contol this overall aging process. It seems that the controlling gene (or set of genes) that oversees this combined change, is missing in these people. This is my best guess at the problem...