A child with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, being treated in the UKALL II Trial, had while in remission an attack of measles and made a normal recovery. Four months later she developed an acute encephalopathy and died within two weeks. The brain showed mild inflammatory features and widespread inclusion bodies in neurones and glial cells. Immunofluorescence proved an infection with measles viru...

AbstractBackground Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis (SSPE) is a fatal progressive neurological disorder following measles infection. Methods Cases were collated from Paediatric Neurology centres in the UK over 24 months 2017 to 2019 and represent all cases referred National Viral Reference Department (VRD). Diagnosis was established with detection of raised index, ...

Introduction Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a rare disease which predominantly affects children of school age. The clinical features include an insidious afebrile onset with behavioural disturbance and progressive dementia sometimes associated with epilepsy. Later akinetic mutism and myoclonic jerks with pyramidal and extrapyramidal signs appear. Finally there is progressive deco...

The nucleotide sequence encoding the C terminus of the nucleocapsid protein of measles virus (MV) is the most variable in the genome. The sequence of this region is reported for 21 new MV strains and for virus RNA obtained from cases of subacute panencephalitis (SSPE) tissue. The nucleotide sequence of a total of 65 MV strains has been analysed using the CLUSTAL program to determine the relatio...

Two sibling viruses of the subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) virus Osaka-2 strain were isolated from a small biopsy specimen of the brain of an SSPE patient just before intraventricular interferon treatment by cocultivation with two different cell lines, Vero cells or B95a cells (Ogura et al, 1997). Both the virus-infected cells were found to be indistinguishable from each other in def...

BACKGROUND Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a rare complication of measles virus infection. The disease is characterized by behavioural abnormalities, intellectual deterioration, motor weakness, and generalized myoclonic jerks progressing to coma and death in one to two years in 80% of the cases. The myoclonic jerks are associated with characteristic generalized slow periodic compl...