Progressive Necrosis of the Spinal Cord

Acute Necrotic Myelopathy in Association with Lymphoma Cells of the Reticulo-Endothelial System, Acute Torticollis, and Recurrent Cardiac Arrest

“…Acute necrotic myelopathy (ANM) is a rare disorder designated by various names: myelomalacia, [2,13] progressive necrosis of the spinal cord, [20] acute and subacute necrotic myelitis, [7] acute necrotic mye lopathy, [8] and myelitis necroticans diffusa [11]. The essential pathol ogical feature is the widespread necrosis of the cord involving predomi nantly white matter.…”

Acute inflammatory myelopathies

“…Other series found that if death did not occur in the acute stage, invariably patients succumbed from the effects of bedsores and urinary infection (Hoffman, 1955;Veron et al, 1974). However, the possibility of long-term survival was also described in certain cases (Moersch and Kernohan, 1934;Adams and Kubik, 1952). As with Foix and Alajouannine, these case series grouped together patients with myelopathies of vacular and inflammatory etiologies.…”

“…Other associated concurrent illnesses included carcinoma, trauma, exposure to heavy metals, recent childbirth, hypertension, and radiotherapy (Folliss and Netsky, 1970). That an inflammatory etiology could contribute to the clinical syndrome of progressive necrotic myelopathy is indicated by the observation of a pleocytosis in several cases (Van Gehuchten, 1927;Low, 1929;Moersch and Kernohan, 1934;Jaffe and Freeman, 1943;Hoffman, 1955;Behar et al, 1957).…”

“…Subsequently, cases of otherwise unexplained necrotizing myelopathy were associated with a wide variety of malignancies, including prostate cancer (Nonne, 1903;Whiteley et al, 1979;Gray et al, 1980), lung cancer (Nonne, 1919;D'Antona, 1926;L'hermitte and Bussière de Robert, 1941;Mancall and Rosales, 1964;Ojeda, 1984;Glantz et al, 1994;Lins et al, 2003), leg sarcoma (Feindel, 1921), squamous cell skin cancer (Moersch and Kernohan, 1934), stomach cancer (Juba, 1938), thyroid cancer (Jaffe and Freeman, 1943;Kuroda et al, 1993), non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (Williams et al, 1962;Richter and Moore, 1968;Nishida and Ziegler, 1973;Whiteley et al, 1979;Gray et al, 1980;Grignani et al, 1992;Drach et al, 1996;Anderson and Borsaru, 2008), breast cancer (Mancall and Rosales, 1964;Sieben et al, 1981;Ojeda, 1984;Mueller et al, 2008), ovarian cancer (Case records of the Massachusetts General Hospital, 1976), leukemia (Reznik, 1979;Grisold et al, 1980;Gieron et al, 1987), Hodgkin's lymphoma (Lester et al, 1979;Dansey et al, 1988;Hughes et al, 1992), renal cell carcinoma (Handforth et al, 1983;Wilson et al, 1983), hepatocellular carcinoma (Misumi et al, 1988), multiple myeloma …”

Incidence of Acute Transverse Myelitis in Rochester, Minnesota, 1970–1980, and Implications with Respect to Influenza Vaccine

“…The pro cess may begin acutely in a few hours or less, or develop subacutely over a period of several days [2], Early in this century, the illness was attributed to vascular disorders, including syphilis, atherosclerosis, and infection [3]. As additional cases were reported, other neuropathologic processes were identified and related to other possible etiologies, including parainfectious inflammatory disor ders [4][5][6][7][8], postvaccinal reactions [9][10][11][12][13][14][15], effects of chemicals and radiation [16][17][18], vascular malformations [19], demyelination as part of multiple sclerosis [20], and necrotic myelopathy as a remote effect of cancer [21,22], Early attempts to define acute transverse myelitis clinically come from sur veys of hospitalized patients [2,[23][24][25] in which the clinical criteria were usually as follows: acute nonrecurrent onset of bilateral, not always symme trical, cross-sectional sensorimotor deficit. Cases thought to be due to known systemic or focal neurologic disorders affecting the cord were usually excluded.…”