Neurologic Alterations Due to Respiratory Virus Infections

Bohmwald, Karen; Gálvez, Nicolás M. S.; Ríos, Mariana; Kalergis, Alexis M.

In 2009 a new H1N1 pandemic was the causative agent of high mortality rates and exhibited increased reports of neurological complications. According to this, a retrospective study of the clinical files of 55 patients infected with H1N1 detected a 50% of visible neurological symptoms (Asadi-Pooya et al., 2011) . In this cohort, the most frequent neurological sign reported was headache −35% of the patients-and a few were diagnosed with severe neurological complication −9% of the patients (Asadi-Pooya et al., 2011) . Another study performed in Malaysia-that collected clinical data from pediatric hospitals during the 2009 pandemic-reported that 8.3% of children under 5 years old presented neurological manifestation, among which the 66.9% of them manifested febrile seizures (Muhammad Ismail et al., 2015) . Importantly, 13.6% and 3.9% of children exhibited influenza-associated encephalitis and acute necrotizing encephalopathy (ANE), respectively (Muhammad Ismail et al., 2015) . However, there was no detection of IAV genetic material in the four CSF samples available, whereas brainimaging showed that a few patients exhibited alterations such as cerebral edema and ANE, besides the three cases where the neurological sequelae were permanent (Muhammad Ismail et al., 2015) .