You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Unusual presentation of more common disease/injury
CASE REPORT
Typhoid fever with isolated left lateral rectus palsy
  1. Abishkar Thapa1,
  2. Nancy Mittal1,
  3. Gyan Kayastha2,
  4. Buddha Basnyat1
  1. 1Oxford University Clinical Research Unit, Patan Hospital, Lalitpur, Province - 3, Nepal
  2. 2Medicine, Patan Academy of Health Sciences, Kathmandu, Province - 3, Nepal
  1. Correspondence to Professor Buddha Basnyat, buddhabasnyat{at}gmail.com

Summary

A 17-year-old young woman presented to Patan Hospital, Kathmandu, Nepal, with high-grade fever and headache for 4 days and non-projectile vomiting for 1 day. She also had blurred vision with dizziness on and off. There was no abnormal physical finding. Enteric fever was suspected, and she was empirically started on azithromycin (20 mg/kg) for 7 days. She became afebrile after 2 days and was followed up in 7 days with diplopia since 5 days. At this time, the blood culture was positive for Salmonella serovar typhi. On examination, there was isolated left lateral rectus palsy which accounted for her diplopia. Methylprednisolone (1 mg/kg) was prescribed which was tapered over 1 month and gradually her diplopia subsided. We hypothesise that vasculitic change in the blood vessel supplying the left abducens nerve could be causing the diplopia.

  • tropical medicine (infectious disease)
  • cranial nerves
  • neuroopthalmology
  • infection (gastroenterology)

https://doi.org/10.1136/bcr-2018-225746

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors The patient was first seen by AT and NM at OPD, and then consulted to GK and BB for management of diplopia. First draft of the case report was written by AT and NM, and forwarded to BB and GK for correction and revision multiple times. Final version of the case report was approved by all the authors.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.