Infectious etiologies of non-compressive myelopathy

ABSTRACT

This work was carried out to study various clinical presentations of myelopathy and clarify different suspected cord lesions. Twenty-nine males and nine females patients as well as ten age matched controls of both sex were chosen. All patients and controls were subjected for a set of laboratory investigation to verify different etiologies. About 47.4% of the cases had duration of illness less than three months and 36.8% had duration of illness more than six months. Over half of the patients were presented with a combination of motor, sensory and autonomic disturbance, while isolated motor affection was reported in 34.2% and about 55.3% of the studied cases had sensory level of hyposthesia [dorsal region in 34.2% and cervical region in 21.1%]. Serological and CSF laboratory studies revealed that most frequent organism was brucella [26.3%] especially among female patients, followed by bilharzia [15.8%]then toxoplasma and mycoplasma [10.5% for each] followed by cytomegalovirus [5.3%] and lastly infectious mono-nucleosis [2.6%]