Neurologic Alterations Due to Respiratory Virus Infections

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

The hRSV is an enveloped, negative-sense singled stranded RNA virus, which belongs to the Mononegavirales order and has recently been assigned to the Pneumoviridae family and the Orthopneumovirus genus (Afonso et al., 2016; King et al., 2018) . Accordingly, this virus has also been recently renamed human Orthopneumovirus, but for the purpose of these publication we will refer to it as hRSV. The main and most studied pathologies caused by hRSV are bronchiolitis and pneumonia (Antonucci et al., 2010) . However, in the past years, extrapulmonary manifestations have been associated with this virus (Eisenhut, 2006) . Notably, there is evidence that relates hRSV infection with pathologies such as myocarditis (Esposito et al., 2010) , hyponatremia (Hanna et al., 2003) , hepatitis (Kirin et al., 2013) and encephalopathy (Ng et al., 2001) . In Wallace and Zealley (1970) , in a study performed in children with a febrile status, hRSV was detected, and its infection was related to neurological damage. Later, Cappel et al. (1975) detected viral antibodies in cerebrospinal fluids (CSF) of patients that have suffered symptoms of CNS infection such as seizures, convulsions and neck stiffness (Figure 1) . One of the most significant findings from this report was that hRSV infection was associated with neurological abnormalities such as encephalitis (Cappel et al., 1975) .