BACKGROUND Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae which is an obligate intracellular pathogen. It is characterised by a broad spectrum of clinical forms dictated by the patient's immune response to the organism. The tuberculoid pole has good cell mediated immunity to M. leprae, with few lesions and bacilli while the lepromatous pole has poor immunity coupled with...

OCULAR manifestations of leprosy constitute a very important aspect of the disease; the loss of vision, leading sometimes to ultimate blindness, may be as serious as any of the other manifestations of the.condition. The frequency of ocular involvement appears to vary greatly and estimates of its incidence vary from 10 to 100 per cent., but in Bengal ocular complications are probably less common...

A certain amount of work has been done on the effect of x-rays in lepromatOus leprosy. As early as 1901 Sequeira used x-rays in leprosy, and this was reported for the first time by Bellot (1) in 1904. Heiser in the Philippines (2), and Matthews in India (5), favored the use of x-rays for treatment of lepromatous leprosy. More recently, Kirwan (3) advocated the use of Grenz rays for the treatmen...

Corticosteroids are the drugs of choice for treatment of type 1 leprosy reactions, but when these agents cannot be used because of their adverse effects, alternative treatments are needed. We report the first case, to our knowledge, of a type 1 leprosy reaction that was successfully treated with methotrexate in a patient intolerant to corticosteroids who had borderline lepromatous leprosy.

A case of borderline-lepromatous leprosy exhibiting alopecia of the scalp along with lepromatous lymphadenitis of suboccipital lymphnode is reported. To our knowledge generalized leprous alopecia of the scalp with lepromatous lymphadenitis of the suboccipital node is a rare occurrence in female Indian patients.

The so-called nerve abscess, one of the interesting features of leprosy, is recognized to be neither common nor rare in the neural and tuberculoid forms of the disease. On the other hand the condition is exceptional and rare in lepromatous leprosy, but it does occur although there are very few reports of it. Some workers, e. g., Hughes (5), have held that nerve abscess occurs only in tuberculoi...

The widespread emergence of dapsone-resistant strains of Mycobacterium leprae in patients with lepromatous leprosy who had been treated with dapsone as monotherapy, is now fully accepted (WHO, 1 977). This growing problem of acquired (secondary) dapsone resistance among the large pool of dapsone­ treated lepromatous patients at risk, could be still more foreboding with the recent reports of new...

A 35-year-old male with lepromatous leprosy showed significant progression of the disease on initial examination. Along with typical lepromatous skin lesions, many scar-forming lesions were present, mainly on his extremities. Some lesions showed erosive surfaces. From clinicopathological findings, these lesions were suspected to be due to the partial excretion of intradermal lepromatous granulo...

Leprosy patients lack specific cellular immunity against Mycobacterium leprae, but other immunological functions are thought to be preserved. However, in a leprosy sanatorium in South Japan between 1982 and 2000, we found that the average age at death of cured lepromatous leprosy patients was about 5 yrs younger than that of cured tuberculoid patients; [male/lepromatous, 76.0 +/- 10.0 yrs old v...

BACKGROUND/AIM Peripheral nerve destruction is the hallmark of leprosy. Ocular complications form a substantial part of the clinical manifestations but histopathology of nerve destruction within ocular structures has not been shown satisfactorily. The role of protein gene product (PGP) 9.5 in identifying nerve destruction in the ciliary body and posterior ciliary nerves of lepromatous eyes is s...