Neurologic Alterations Due to Respiratory Virus Infections

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

Related to this, Morichi et al. (2017) examined molecular markers in CSF as a prognostic indicator of encephalopathy severity -which includes NO, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and IL-6 ( Figure 1) . The analysis of these molecular markers was categorized by the encephalopathy type described earlier, in addition to the non-evaluated encephalopathy type (Morichi et al., 2017) . Although the authors analyzed a low number of cases, they found that in two patients with cytokine storm encephalopathy, IL-6 and BDNF were significantly elevated, when compared to the control group (Morichi et al., 2017) . Moreover, in four patients with non-evaluated encephalopathy, the levels of NO were significantly higher than in the control group (Morichi et al., 2017) . The Pediatric Cerebral Performance Category Scale (PCPC) score was used in order to correlate these results to the neurologic prognosis. Only IL-6 and BDNF correlated with PCPC scores, indicating that in more damaged patients, the secretion of these molecules is elevated (Morichi et al., 2017) . These tools are nowadays an import advantage in the understanding of the neuropathies associated with hRSV-infection and help to prevent that severe cases lead to death, as was described recently (Xu et al., 2018) .