Segmental spinal dysgenesis is a rare and challenging entity especially when associated with occult dysraphism. Experience with a female patient followed during a period of 10 years spanning from 5 to 15 years of age is reported. During that period the girl underwent three spinal operations consisting in one decompression and spinal cord untethering, one posterior instrumented fusion and a spin...

Lumbo-costo-vertebral syndrome, which includes abnormalities of the vertebral bodies, ribs and trunk musculature, is very rare and only few cases have been reported. We report a case of 18-month-old female child with absent ribs, hemivertebrae, superior lumbar hernia (features of lumbo-costo-vertebral syndrome) and posterior spinal dysraphism, which to our knowledge is the first case in the Eng...

Spinal dysraphisms are lesions that can be identified at ultrasound screening examination from the second trimester of pregnancy, the majority being localized in the lumbosacral region. We present the case of prenatal ultrasound diagnosis of a 18 weeks fetus with cervical open dysraphism, a rare localization of open spinal dysraphisms. The alteration of cerebral normal anatomy was first identi...

Iniencephaly is an extremely rare neural tube defect characterized by the triad of fixed retroflexion of the head, variable degrees of cervical lordosis and dysraphism, and an occipital bone defect involving the foramen magnum. Incidence ranges from 0.1 to 10 in 10,000. Although there have been cases of iniencephaly reported as an isolated anomaly, it very rarely occurs alone. We report here a ...

Two cases are reported of patients with spinal dysraphism who developed abscesses within the spinal cord. In one case the infection had spread to the cord through a dermal sinus, as in the six cases previously recorded in the literature. In the other patient the sepsis developed within an intramedullary epidermoid tumour, but the route of infection was not clear. Each patient made a virtually f...

It is with great interest that we read the paper entitled, “A rare case of giant multiseptated thoracic myelomeningocele with segmental placode” by Patnaik and Mahapatra.[4] The authors described a rare presentation of a thoracic spinal dysraphism. The child they presented had no neurological and urologic deterioration, which is very uncommon in a thoracic myelomeningocele, and the magnetic res...

Spinal dysraphism, not associated with vertebral defect or arthrogryposis, was found in a 3-day-old Holstein-Friesian calf that was clinically diagnosed as having encephalopathy. The dysraphic lesion occurred in the sixth (C6) and seventh (C7) segments of the cervical spinal cord. Microscopically, the lesion was characterized by hydromyelia, syringomyelia, anomaly of the ventral median fissure,...