Altered Mental Status and Respiratory Failure in an 11-Year-Old Female

Pediatric Absence Status Epilepticus: Prolonged Altered Mental Status in an 8-Year-Old Boy

Absence status epilepticus is characterized by a prolonged state of impaired consciousness or altered sensorium with generalized electroencephalographic abnormalities. It is most commonly diagnosed in patients with known idiopathic generalized epilepsy; however, it may also be the first presentation of epilepsy. Due to the subtle and variable manifestations of the condition, absence status epil...

Photo quiz: A 58-year-old female with altered mental status.

A 16-year-old boy with altered mental status.

and colleagues discuss hard-to-diagnose cases. A 16-year-old boy was transferred from an outside hospital for evaluation of altered mental status. Earlier in the month, he had begun having feelings of nervousness and anxiety. He reported hearing voices and having visual hallucinations. According to his parents, these symptoms had begun after the patient had been out clubbing with his friends; h...

An 8-year-old boy with Fever, axillary ulcerative lesion, and altered mental status.

Figure 1. Left axillary lesion Figure 2. Wright stain of the patient's CSF sample, revealing 87% lymphocytes (including many atypical lymphocytes) and 13% neutrophils. Diagnosis: tularemia with meningitis. After the lumbar puncture was performed, intravenous cef-triaxone was added to the patient's vancomycin therapy, and later that day, treatment with intravenous doxycycline and gen-tamicin was...

Chronic Eosinophilic Pneumonia in an 11-Year-Old Boy

Idiopathic chronic eosinophilic pneumonia is a rare and serious disease mostly encountered in female asthmatic patients in their fifth decade of life and rarely in children.  Herein, we describe an 11-year-old boy presenting with clubbing of fingers and post-exertional cough without asthma and peripheral eosinophilia.  He had had a restrictive pattern in his pulmonary function test that showed ...