TY  - JOUR
A1  - Cadar, Dániel
A1  - Jellinger, Kurt A.
A1  - Riederer, Peter
A1  - Strobel, Sabrina
A1  - Monoranu, Camelia-Maria
A1  - Tappe, Dennis
T1  - No metagenomic evidence of causative viral pathogens in postencephalitic parkinsonism following encephalitis lethargica
JF  - Microorganisms
N2  - Postencephalitic parkinsonism (PEP) is a disease of unknown etiology and pathophysiology following encephalitis lethargica (EL), an acute-onset polioencephalitis of cryptic cause in the 1920s. PEP is a tauopathy with multisystem neuronal loss and gliosis, clinically characterized by bradykinesia, rigidity, rest tremor, and oculogyric crises. Though a viral cause of EL is likely, past polymerase chain reaction-based investigations in the etiology of both PEP and EL were negative. PEP might be caused directly by an unknown viral pathogen or the consequence of a post-infectious immunopathology. The development of metagenomic next-generation sequencing in conjunction with bioinformatic techniques has generated a broad-range tool for the detection of unknown pathogens in the recent past. Retrospective identification and characterization of pathogens responsible for past infectious diseases can be successfully performed with formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples. In this study, we analyzed 24 FFPE brain samples from six patients with PEP by unbiased metagenomic next-generation sequencing. Our results show that no evidence for the presence of a specific or putative (novel) viral pathogen was found, suggesting a likely post-infectious immune-mediated etiology of PEP.
KW  - postencephalitic parkinsonism
KW  - encephalitis lethargica
KW  - von Economo
KW  - metagenomics
KW  - neuropathology
KW  - tauopathy
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-245074
SN  - 2076-2607
VL  - 9
IS  - 8
ER  -