Rinsho Shinkeigaku (Clinical Neurology)

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Neurology

Chronic progressive cervical myelopathy with HTLV-I infection: variant form of HAM/TSP

Fujio Umehara, M.D.

Department of Neurology and Geriatrics, Graduate School of Kagoshima University

We report four patients with slowly progressive cervical myelopathy. The four patients had several features in common; 1) progressive cervical myelopathy with a duration of several months to years, 2) abnormal lesions in the cervical to upper thoracic cord levels with or without gadolinium enhancement, 3) anti-HTLV-I antibodies were positive both in serum and CSF, 4) high levels of HTLV-I proviral load in PBMC. The calculated risk of HAM/TSP in two patients showed a high value, comparable to those of HAM/TSP, and higher than those of healthy HTLV-I carrier. Because the clinical and laboratory findings of these four cases show similarities to those of HAM/TSP, we propose that these four cases may be a variant form of HAM/TSP.

(CLINICA NEUROL, 45: 916|918, 2005)
key words: HAM/TSP, HTLV-I, cervical cord, MRI, Variant HAM

(Received: 26-May-05)