BACKGROUND The prevailing teaching in medical school curricula and in medical textbooks is that if thiamine deficiency is suspected, thiamine supplementation should be given before administering glucose. OBJECTIVE We sought to evaluate the published evidence describing the commonly held belief that thiamine supplementation must be given before glucose in hypoglycemic patients to prevent Werni...

An optimized clinical functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) protocol with a total scanning time of 8 min is presented that localizes Broca's and Wernicke's areas robustly and determines hemispheric dominance. Language function was visualized using two different sentence generation (SG) and word generation (WG) tasks. Block designed blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) fMRI was applie...

Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is a neuropsychiatric disorder resulting from thiamine deficiency and commonly associated with chronic alcoholism, but we describe the first case report resulting from self-neglect associated with depression.

Nutritional deficiency can cause, mainly in chronic alcoholic subjects, the Wernicke encephalopathy and its chronic neurological sequela, the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (WKS). Long-term chronic ethanol abuse results in hippocampal and cortical cell loss. Thiamine deficiency also alters principally hippocampal- and frontal cortical-dependent neurochemistry; moreover in WKS patients, important p...

CONTEXT Acute pancreatitis can lead to prolonged fasting and malnutrition. Many metabolic changes, including thiamine deficiency, may lead to the well know pancreatic encephalopathy. In this condition however the thiamine deficiency is rarely suspected. CASE REPORT We report the case of a 17-year-old woman with severe acute pancreatitis who developed mental status changes and ophthalmoplegia....

Wernicke’s encephalopathy (WE) is an acute neuro-psychiatric syndrome due to inadequate supply of thiamine (vitamin B1) to the brain which leads to significant morbidity and mortality. Although alcohol use is the most common predisposing factor but Wernicke’s encephalopathy can occur in any patient with nutritional deficiency conditions such as hyperemesis gravidarum, hemodialysis, malignancy, ...

We have investigated a thiamine-dependent enzyme, transketolase, in cultured fibroblasts from 41 human subjects, including patients with alcoholism-associated Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (n = 3), familial chronic alcoholic males (n = 7), their sons (n = 7), nonalcoholic men (n = 7), their male offspring (n = 7), and three generations of an Amish family (n = 10) without any history of alcoholism...

We read with special interest the article of Zuccoli et al entitled “MR Imaging Findings in 56 Patients with Wernicke Encephalopathy: Nonalcoholics May Differ from Alcoholics.” The authors reported the imaging features of Wernicke encephalopathy (WE), which include symmetric alterations in the thalami, mammillary bodies, tectal plate, and periaqueductal area, and other less typical imaging find...

Wernicke encephalopathy (WE) is an acute neuropsychiatric syndrome resulting from thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency, classically characterized by the triad of ophthalmoplegia, confusion, and ataxia. While commonly associated with chronic alcoholism, WE may also occur in the setting of poor nutrition or absorption. We present a 37-year-old woman who underwent laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy and p...