BACKGROUND The CNS inflammatory demyelinating disorders of childhood include both self-limited and lifelong conditions, which can be indistinguishable at the time of initial presentation. Clinical, biologic, and radiographic delineation of the various monophasic and chronic childhood demyelinating disorders requires an operational classification system to facilitate prospective research studies...

Chronic infection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) is associated with a large spectrum of extrahepatic manifestations (EHMs), mostly immunologic/rheumatologic in nature owing to B-cell proliferation and clonal expansion. Neurological complications are thought to be immune-mediated or secondary to invasion of neural tissues by HCV, as postulated in transverse myelitis and encephalopathic forms. Prim...

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is an autoimmune demyelinating disorder of the central nervous system and can present following influenza A infections as multifocal neurological deficits. ADEM remains a challenging diagnosis, and high clinical suspicious coupled with laboratory investigations and neuroimaging is required to exclude other primary and secondary demyelinating disorders.

Over the past 5 years, our knowledge has been significantly enhanced in the field of immune-mediated inflammatory disorders of central nervous system in children. These exciting developments along with identification of novel autoimmune markers have provided new diagnostic approaches and, more important, have led to appropriate immunotherapy to halt disease progression and prevent relapses. Rec...

Extensive research over the last decades basically failed to identify a common cause of noninfectious inflammatory central nervous system (CNS) demyelinating disease. To a great extent, this may reflect that the group of inflammatory CNS demyelinating disorders likely contains multiple pathogenetically distinct disease entities. Indeed, the greatest success so far in deciphering the pathogenesi...

The first case of recurrent neuritis was published by Eichhorst in 1890 (1). In 1958, Austin (2) described steroid responsiveness, recurrence and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) protein elevation. Dyck and colleagues (3) described the clinicopathological findings of monophasic progression, steady deterioration, stepwise progression and recurrence, with histologic peripheral nervious system (PNS) infl...