Diseases Flashcards
Progressive Supranuclear Palsy
Vertical gaze palsy
Subcortical dementia symptoms - slowness of mental processing, forgetfulness, impaired cognition, apathy, and depression
Unsteady gait and mild bradykinesia and rigidity of both upper limbs
Meningitis
Kernig’s sign - Severe stiffness of the hamstrings causes an inability to straighten the leg when the hip is flexed to 90 degrees
Brudzinski sign - knee and hips flex on flexing of neck
Parkinson’s Disease
Micrographia
Parietal Lobe Infarct
Gerstmann’s Syndrome
L’Hermittes sign
MS
67yo woman with progressive dementia syndrome, on no psychotropics. Now displaying myoclonic jerks +/- depressive symptoms.
Variant CJD
Disinhibition post stroke
Orbitofrontal lobe involvement - frontal lobe syndrome
Shy Drager Syndrome
Shy Drager syndrome comes under Multi System Atrophy and is part of the Parkinson plus syndromes. Autonomic involvement, bladder involvement and features of Parkinsonism are clues.
Hemiballismus
Hyperkinetic involuntary movement disorder characterized by intermittent, sudden, violent, involuntary, flinging, or ballistic high amplitude movements involving the ipsilateral arm and leg caused dysfunction in the central nervous system of the contralateral side.
Usually caused by lesion, usually infarct in or around contralateral subthalamic nucleus.
Athetosis
Slow, writhing, and continuous worm-like movement of the limbs or trunk.
Due to basal ganglia involvement.
Chorea
Ongoing random-appearing sequence of one or more discrete involuntary movements or movement fragments
Hungtinton’s disease
Neurodegenerative disease, mostly inherited, that affects basal ganglia causing hyperkinetic movement disorder.
Earliest symptoms - mood symptoms.
As disease progresses, physical abilities worsen + chorea, and dementia can emerge.
Caused by too many trinucleotide CAG repeats in HTT gene resulting in mutation (mutant huntingtin gene)
Autosomal dominant inheritance, sex dependent.
Anton Babinski Disease
Visual anosognosia, or denial of vision loss, associated with confabulation, or making up experiences to compensate for memory loss, in the setting of cortical blindness.
20F presents with FEP as well as chest and abdominal pain and muscle weakness
Acute intermittent porphyria is a rare autosomal dominant disease characterized by a deficiency of hydroxymethylbilane synthase (HMBS). It presents with abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, peripheral neuropathy, and seizures.
70M presents with demented, dermatitis, glossitis and diarrhoea
Pellagra is a systemic disease caused by a severe deficiency of niacin (vitamin B3). It affects the whole body and can eventually lead to death. Primary pellagra is caused by a lack of niacin in your diet. It usually occurs in poor and food-limited populations.
A 50yo refugee from Ethiopia presents with dementia, ataxia, psychosis and on examination, mild focal hemiparesis and abnormal pupils - what’s the most appropriate Ix?
Lumber puncture
A 60yo woman with cognitive impairment following a R sided CVA, 6-month earlier presents with recurrent brief episodes of acute onset of visual and auditory hallucinations followed by loss of consciousness and urinary incontinence. What’s investigation to clarify dx?
MRI
Delayed relation of tendon reflexes
Hypothyroidism
Anton’s syndrome
This is a manifestation of bilateral occipital lobe damage in cortically blind patients. These patients lack insight into their disease and deny their blindness.
Bilateral loss of vibration and position sense in legs
Tabes dorsaljtis due to involvement of dorsal columns
Neurosyphillis
What is it called when there is a failure to recognise the whole of a complex picture while being able to identify individual parts
Simultagnosia
Occurs in Balint’s syndrome (oculomotor apraxia and optic ataxia) and involves lesions of the posterior occipitoparietal lobe
72yo recovering from L sided hemiplegia following intracranial haemorrhage develops sudden aimless and vigorous swinging movements of trunk and left arm
Hemiballismus
Older person with stepwise deterioration, fluctuating course, focal neurological signs including brisk reflex, spastic weakness limb and extensor plantar response.
Abrupt onset.
Multi infarct dementia
Migraine and recurrent small subcritical infarcts, TIAs and affective disturbance
CADASIL
- mutation on chromosome 19 (NOTCH gene)