Rinsho Shinkeigaku (Clinical Neurology)

Educational Lecture 3

Macroscopic findings of brains are helpful in differential diagnosis of neurological disorders

Mari Yoshida, M.D.1)

1)Institute for Medical Science of Aging, Aichi Medical University

Neuropathological diagnosis is essential in neurological disorders. Neurological signs and neuroimaging play a major role in clinical diagnosis. Although neuroimaging indicates the location and size of lesions, which is useful to longitudinal evaluation of edema or atrophy, pathological diagnosis is absolutely necessary to qualitative diagnosis. The first step of pathological diagnosis starts to observe macroscopic findings of brains, which reveal the distribution of lesions specific to individual disorders. Since the macroscopic abnormal findings are based on the microscopic degenerative findings, it may be no exaggeration to say that macroscopic findings enable to make neuropathological diagnosis. Accuracy of macroscopic finding is corrected or revised with microscopic findings and finally compared with neuroimaging and clinical diagnosis. Therefore it is very important and useful to learn macroscopic findings of neurological disorders.
Full Text of this Article in Japanese PDF (3238K)

(CLINICA NEUROL, 53: 919|922, 2013)
key words: neuropathological diagnosis, macroscopic findings, microscopic findings, clinical diagnosis, neuroimaging

(Received: 31-May-13)