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New disease
An adult norovirus-related encephalitis/encephalopathy with mild clinical manifestation
  1. En Kimura1,
  2. Hitomi Goto1,
  3. Akie Migita1,
  4. Seiya Harada2,
  5. Satoshi Yamashita1,
  6. Teruyuki Hirano1,
  7. Makoto Uchino1
  1. 1Department of Neurology, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan
  2. 2Department of Microbiology, Kumamoto Prefectural Institute of Public Health and Environmental Science, Uto, Japan
  1. Correspondence to En Kimura, enkimura{at}kumamoto-u.ac.jp

Summary

Norovirus is an emerging pathogen that causes gastroenteritis outbreaks. Here, we reported an adult female case of norovirus-related encephalitis/encephalopathy (NvREE) with abnormal behaviour, apathy, motor aphasia, bradykinesia and gait disturbance. We treated the patient with intravenous methyl-prednisolone pulse therapy and she recovered quickly. There were slight abnormal signals in the cortex of the opercular part and insula on the MRI fluid-attenuated inversion-recovery (FLAIR) image, generalised slow wave as a background activity in her EEG and cerebrospinal fluid pleocytosis, which restored soon after her recovery. We successfully detected the norovirus genome in stool samples from all seven family members. This is a first case report of an adult NvREE with detection of pathogenic evidence. There could be more cases of NvREE with mild neuropsychiatric symptoms, considering the increasing outbreaks each year.

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Footnotes

  • Competing interests None.

  • Patient consent Obtained.