Tuberculous Meningitis

Abstract

Please use Adobe Acrobat Reader to read this book chapter for free. Just open this same document with Adobe Reader. If you do not have it, you can download it here. You can freely access the chapter at the Web Viewer here. Meningitis 66 Brandão, 2007). According to literature, although the NTM species involved in theaetiopathogenesis of meningitis include all four groups of the Runyon classification, those more commonly encountered are the Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC), Mycobacterium kansasii, M. bovis, M. abscessus, M. fortuitum and Mycobacterium nonchromogenicum, the latter being a nonpigmented, slow growing organism which belongs to Runyon group III and a part of the Mycobacterium terrae complex. It is reported that M. avium complex remains the most common organism causing systemic opportunistic bacterial infections in patients with HIV infection, carrying a higher mortality rate despite appropriate treatment, while M. kansasii meningitis is similar to M. tuberculosis meningitis. Therefore, when NTM are isolated in culture of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), they should not routinely be dismissed as contaminants but considered a significant finding (Cegielski &