Based on the imaging results and her clinical symptoms, she was finally diagnosed with non-herpetic limbic encephalitis
and treated with methyl-prednisolone pulse therapy (1 g/day for 3 days). Immediately after starting steroid treatment, her fever and headache disappeared, and her short-term memory loss subsequently improved. However, because her mild somnolence persisted, a second cycle of methyl-prednisolone pulse therapy (1 g/day for 3 days) was commenced on day 18 of the illness. After Saracatinib molecular weight this treatment, the patient recovered completely without any neurological sequelae. As HSV infections are commonly associated with encephalitis, PCR detection of viral DNA in CSF is a popular method for diagnosing encephalitis. In general, patients who are suspected to have encephalitis, including limbic encephalitis, undergo an examination to determine whether the diagnosis is herpes simplex encephalitis. Non-herpetic acute limbic encephalitis case, which has been determined to be HSV-negative by PCR analysis of the CSF, could be caused by any of the six other human herpesviruses. In order to investigate this possibility we used real-time PCR methods, which have been suggested to be valuable tools for diagnosing encephalitis (11–14), to measure the viral DNA load in CSF samples. The reliability of the previously established real-time PCR methods
is selleck chemicals llc high, and the sensitivities of these methods (10 gene copies/reaction) were considered to be sufficient for detection of small amounts of viral DNA in CSF. None of the CSF samples collected from non-herpetic acute limbic Pembrolizumab supplier encephalitis patients contained DNA from the six herpesviruses, except for one patient who was EBV DNA-positive. Although HHV-6 is thought to be a causative agent for post-transplant acute limbic encephalitis (3–5), none of the CSF samples in this study contained HHV-6 DNA. Although in vitro examinations were not performed to evaluate the patients’ immunity, their medical records indicated that all of them appeared to be immunocompetent.
Therefore, although there were a limited number of samples in this study, these results suggest that HHV-6 is not the main causative agent for non-herpetic acute limbic encephalitis in immunocompetent individuals. However, a limitation of this study is that only one CSF sample from each patient was tested. It is well known that repeat examination of CSF samples is useful to determine whether or not causative agents are present in the CSF. Large number of samples should be analyzed to further elucidate this question in a future study. Only one CSF sample contained EBV DNA, and this was at 1184 copies/ml. As the patient did not show typical clinical features of infectious mononucleosis, serological examination for EBV infection was not performed.
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