Encephalitis lethargica miasms

Clinic

• It is an atypic encephalitis , also known as "sleeping sickness" or "sleepy sickness"
• Disease attacks the brain, leaving some victims in a statue-like condition, speechless and motionless.
• Between 1915 and 1926, an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica spread around the world. The exact number of people infected is unknown, but it is estimated that more than one million people contracted the disease during the epidemic, which directly caused more than 500,000 deaths. Most of those who survived never returned to their pre-morbid vigour.
• They would be conscious and aware – yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference. They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life; they were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies.
• It is associated with complex stereotypical movements along with other clinical features like dystonia, parkinsonism, irritability, psychiatric behaviour, agitation, oculogyric crisis, and autonomic instability

Signs / Symptoms

• High fever, sore throat, headache, Lethargy
• Double vision
• Delayed physical and mental response
• Sleep inversion
• Catatonia
• Coma-like state (akinetic mutism)
• Abnormal eye movements ("oculogyric crises")
• Parkinsonism, upper body weakness, muscular pains, tremors, neck rigidity, and behavioral changes including psychosis
• Klazomania (a vocal tic)

Miasm

JE

Cause

• Uncertain, maybe infectious disease (Viral / Bacterial)
• Related disease
  • Postencephalitic Parkinsonism due to influenza pandemic; evidence for viral causation of the Parkinson's symptoms is circumstantial (epidemiologic, and finding influenza antigens in encephalitis lethargica patients), while evidence arguing against this cause is of the negative sort (for example, lack of viral RNA in postencephalitic Parkinsonian brain material). In reviewing the relationship between influenza and encephalitis lethargica (EL), McCall and coauthors conclude, as of 2008, that "the case against influenza [is] less decisive than currently perceived… there is little direct evidence supporting influenza in the etiology of EL," and that "[a]lmost 100 years after the EL epidemic, its etiology remains enigmatic." Hence, while opinions on the relationship of encephalitis lethargica to influenza remain divided, the preponderance of literature appears skeptical.

The German neurologist Felix Stern, who examined hundreds of encephalitis lethargica patients during the 1920s, noted that their encephalitis lethargica typically evolved over time. The early symptoms would be dominated by sleepiness or wakefulness. A second symptom would lead to an oculogyric crisis. The third symptom would be recovery, followed by a Parkinson-like syndrome. If patients of Stern followed this course of disease, he diagnosed them with encephalitis lethargica. Stern suspected encephalitis lethargica to be close to poliomyelitis, without evidence. Nevertheless, he experimented with the convalescent serum of survivors of the first acute syndrome. He vaccinated patients with early-stage symptoms, telling them that it might be successful. Stern is author of the definitive 1920s book, Die Epidemische Encephalitis.

In 2010, in a substantial Oxford University Press compendium reviewing the historic and contemporary views on EL, its editor, Joel Vilensky, of the Indiana University School of Medicine, quotes another researcher, writing in 1930, who states, "we must confess that etiology is still obscure, the causative agent still unknown, the pathological riddle still unsolved…", and goes on to offer the following conclusion, as of that publication date:

Does the present volume solve the "riddle" of EL, which… has been referred to as the greatest medical mystery of the 20th century? Unfortunately, no: but inroads are certainly made here pertaining to diagnosis, pathology, and even treatment."

Subsequent to publication of this compendium, an enterovirus was discovered in encephalitis lethargica cases from the epidemic. In 2012, Oliver Sacks, the author of the book Awakenings, about institutionalized survivors, acknowledged this virus as the probable cause of the disease. Other sources have suggested Streptococcus pneumoniae as a cause.