Within the last few years, a new group of diseases featured with cognitive impairment, seizures and behavior disorders was reported. And these diseases were commonly diagnosed as “viral encephalitis” and “sporadic encephalitis” than autoimmune encephalitis (AE) before AE had confirmed etiological. With the development of autoantibody serological tests, many patients who had been previously cons...

The importance of immunology in relation to neurological diseases has long been recognized. The first description of immune mediated encephalitis was in 1960’s by Corsellis et al 1 and Brierley et al 2 , who separately documented a form of encephalitis with poor prognosis in adults with tumours. The demonstration of anti-neuronal antibodies associated with this form of encephalitis (Hu, CV2/CRM...

Investigators at August Pi Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute and University of Barcelona performed a prospective surveillance study in 14 patients with immune-mediating relapsing symptoms of post-herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE).

Anti-N-Methyl-D-Aspartate-Receptor (NMDA-R) encephalitis is a new autoimmune disorder, often paraneoplastic in nature, presenting with complex neuropsychiatric symptoms. Diagnosed serologically, this disorder is often responsive to immunosuppressant treatment. We here in report the case of a 56-year-old man with anti NMDA-R encephalitis presenting initially with disorientation and hallucinati...

Limbic encephalitis is characterized by adaptive autoimmune inflammation of the gray matter structures of the limbic system. It has recently been identified as a major cause of temporal lobe epilepsy accompanied by progressive declarative - mainly episodic - -memory disturbance as well as a variety of rather poorly defined emotional and behavioral changes. While autoimmune inflammation of the h...

Anti-N-methyl-d-aspartate (Anti-NMDA) receptor encephalitis is an acute autoimmune neurological disorder. The cause of this disease is often unknown, and previous studies revealed that it might be caused by a virus, vaccine or tumor. It occurs more often in females than in males. Several cases were reported to be related to vaccination such as the H1N1 vaccine and tetanus/diphtheria/pertussis a...

Type I diabetes and multiple sclerosis (MS) are distinct autoimmune diseases where T cells target either islet or CNS self-proteins. Unexpectedly, we found that autoreactive T cells in diabetic patients, relatives with high diabetes risk, nonobese diabetic (NOD) mice, and MS patients routinely target classical islet as well as CNS autoantigens. The pathogenic potential of CNS autoreactivity was...

Knut the polar bear of the Berlin Zoological Garden drowned in 2011 following seizures and was diagnosed as having suffered encephalitis of unknown etiology after exhaustive pathogen screening. Using the diagnostic criteria applied to human patients, we demonstrate that Knut's encephalitis is almost identical to anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis which is a severe autoimmune disease representing t...