[Pathology of the cytomegaly; inclusion body disease, virus disease of the salivary glands]

Postencephalitic porencephaly, hydranencephaly or polymicrogyria. A review

Twenty necropsy cases of the association of fetal encephalitis with porencephaly, hydranencephaly or polymicrogyria were reviewed including 5 from the authors' material. The latter include a basket brain, a porencephalic necrosis of recent date and a polymicrogyria in the formative state. The supratentorial lesions are often associated with cerebellar cortical dysplasias. The pathogenetic interdependence of encephalitis and hemispheric defects or malformation is discussed. Examples are given in which the infection appears to be secondary to a pre-existent hemispheric lesion. For others the hemispheric lesions appear to be secondary to encephalitis. In these the encephalitis may produce secondary lesions by a variety of pathogenetic mechanisms.

Double encephalitis with herpes simplex virus and cytomegalovirus in an adult

A 51-year-old housewife developed symptoms of a cold followed by high fever, delirium, coma, rigidity of extremity muscles, positive Babinski sign and generalized convulsions, while complement-fixing antibody titre to herpes simplex virus in the sera raised over 128 X and declined to 8 X in the course. She finally expired of bronchopneumonia following status epilepticus after 94 days of illness. Severe necrosis with extensive hemorrhage in the white matter was predominant in the temporal, insular and orbitofrontal cortex, thalamus and globus pallidus. Focal rarefaction of the cerebral cortex with a very few eosinophilic intranuclear inclusions in the oligodendroglia and nerve cells, nerve cell destruction in the substantia nigra with glial nodules and perivascular inflammatory cell cuffs were observed. Abundant cytomegalic inclusion cells, originating from hypertrophic astrocytes, were present in the necrotic areas of cerebrum as well as in the rarefied tissue in the subependymal layers of the brainstem and cerebellum. Electron-microscopic study of the cytomegalic cells demonstrated the presence of numerous virions in both nucleus and cytoplasm. Fortuitour infection of the brain by cytomegalovirus with necrotizing encephalitis by herpes simplex virus is unique. The cause of double viral infections and severe lesions by less virulent strains is discussed.