Brown-Séquard Syndrome as a First Presentation of Multiple Sclerosis

Clinical Reasoning: A 24-Year-Old Woman With Penetrating Neck Injury From a Needlefish

Evaluating patients with a traumatic spinal cord injury can be complicated by other injuries. In this case, a 24-year-old woman injured by a needlefish presented with combined motor and sensory defects, cranial nerve deficits, and a blunt vascular injury. This case highlights the importance of neurologic and vascular localizations and an understanding of spinal cord injuries involving various ascending and descending tracts. Appreciation of these anatomical considerations through this case illustrates the diagnostic approach to neurologic evaluation. While we present a traumatic etiology for multiple neurologic syndromes, this case gives readers an opportunity to develop a comprehensive differential diagnosis and tailor investigations for other relevant etiologies. Readers walking through this stepwise process will ultimately arrive at several distinct but related diagnoses.

Newly Diagnosed Multiple Sclerosis Presenting as Brown-Séquard Syndrome: A Case Report

Introduction

Brown-Séquard syndrome is a rare neurological disorder due to hemisection of the spinal cord that can occur from a variety of causes, most commonly trauma.

Case Report

We present a case of a 25-year-old woman presenting with Brown-Séquard syndrome as her first clinical presentation of multiple sclerosis.

Conclusion

This case highlights the need to have demyelinating disease on the differential as an exceedingly rare, but important, possible cause of Brown-Séquard syndrome.

[Acute myelitis with Brown-Séquard syndrome complicated with subjective sudomotor laterality and ileocecal abscess without right abdominal pain]

A 47-year-old man presented with left shoulder pain and muscle weakness in the left limbs on November 2017. On the next day, he experienced dysesthesia of the right limbs and hypohidrosis of the left limbs and developed thermal hypoalgesia in right side of body and muscle weakness of the left upper and lower limbs progressed. He was diagnosed with acute myelitis and Brown-Séquard syndrome, based on cervical MRI scan. Muscle strength improved after steroid therapy and plasma exchange. He experienced complications of intraabdominal abscess in the right side during immunological therapy, although he only had a symptom of left abdominal pain, without pain in the right side. It is noteworthy that abdominal hypoalgesia can be associated with Brown-Séquard syndrome. Characteristically, MRI revealed bilateral lesions at the C3/4 cervical spine level. This report shows that in Brown-Séquard syndrome associated with bilateral spinal lesions, the abdominal visceral sensory pathway, in addition to the somatosensory pathway, could be impaired bilaterally, resulting in aggravation of abdominal hypoalgesia.