We honor Mauria’s memory by continuing our mission to seek treatments and a cure for Infantile Neuroaxonal Dystrophy (INAD) and other forms of PLA2G6-related neurodegeneration (PLAN).You can make a gift to support our mission in Mauria’s honor.
06/20/1985 | 04/23/1989
Mauria was a beautiful baby girl with sweet dimples, smiles that lit up the whole room, and a contagious giggle. Though she only said a few words before she started losing her abilities, her big brown eyes spoke volumes. Through them, we could see her love, pain, joy, frustration, playful attitude, and stubbornness.
She adored her family and when she was mobile, Mauria was inseparable from the brother that was 13 months older than her. He would get into mischief and perform silly antics just so he could hear her giggle.
INAD is a cruel disease. Mauria developed typically until she was about 18 months old. Then we started noticing odd things: her eyes would wobble back and forth, she wasn’t strong enough to cruise around the furniture anymore, eventually, she was too floppy to even sit in her walker. By the time she received her diagnosis around 2 1/2 years old, she had lost nearly every acquired skill. She died due to pneumonia, complicated by INAD, just a few months before her fourth birthday.