BACKGROUND Progressive myelomalacia (PMM) is a catastrophic disease associated with acute intervertebral disc extrusion (IVDE). Published data on the clinical characteristics of this disease are limited. OBJECTIVE To describe the onset and progression of clinical signs of PMM in a large case cohort. ANIMALS Fifty-one dogs, 18 with histopathologically confirmed PMM, 33 presumptively diagnose...

MR examinations of the spine were reviewed in 25 patients with a clinical diagnosis of tethered spinal cord. In 21 patients (84%), the level of the tip of the conus was below the mid L2 vertebral body. The causes of the tethering were spinal lipomas (72%), tight filum terminale syndrome (12%), diastematomyelia (8%), and myelomeningocele (8%). These entities were readily identified in all instan...

Progressive walking difficulties and bladder dysfunction may be attributed to Alzheimer disease or atlanto-axial subluxation in people with Down's syndrome (DS). The present authors describe five patients with DS suffering from the above symptoms as a result of cervical spondylarthrotic myelopathy. Clinical and radiological data were collected from all patients with DS who underwent surgery for...

PURPOSE To correlate the radiographic measurement, cord diameter shown on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and clinical hand sign of cervical myelopathic patients. METHODS Patients with clinical cervical myelopathy who had had MRI in Kwong Wah Hospital between January 2001 and December 2002 were enlisted. Their cervical spine radiographs and clinical records were reviewed. RESULTS Of 36 pa...

In the case of Sahadevan and col. 2 3 the lateral ischemia of the medulla oblongata in a man 19 years old took place prior to the vertebral angiography and it was precisely the cause of this examination; as a complication following the mentioned angiography, a transient cortical blindness appeared. Incidentally, cortical blindness seems to constitute one of the most frequent complication of ver...

Five patients with chronic arachnoiditis and syringomyelia were studied. Three patients had early life meningitis and developed symptoms of syringomyelia eight, 21, and 23 years after the acute infection. One patient had a spinal dural thoracic AVM and developed a thoracic syrinx 11 years after spinal subarachnoid haemorrhage and five years after surgery on the AVM. A fifth patient had tubercul...

Vascular accidents involving the spinal cord, in contrast to the brain, are extremely rare. Damage to the spinal cord from verified emboli seems to be an even greater rarity and no examples were found by Blackwood (1958) in a series of 3,737 postmortem reports from the National Hospital, Queen Square, London. Embolic myelomalacia has been reported in bacterial endocarditis and other forms of he...

Thirteen patients with prior cervical spinal cord injury resulting in quadriplegia were evaluated with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) long after their initial injury, either because of the relatively recent onset of new and worsening neurologic symptoms or to rule our residual compression on the spinal cord or nerve roots. The results of MRI were compared with delayed metrizamide computed tom...