what is confluent demyelination?
Posted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 2:54 pm
I was looking for perivenous demyelination articles, assuming they would be related to MS, and I have found this one:
They say that perivenous demyelination is a hallmark for ADEM instead of MS, and that MS presents something called "confluent demyelination". What is that?
Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20129932
Distinction between acute disseminated encephalomyelitis and acute multiple sclerosis is often clinically difficult. Perivenous demyelination is the pathological hallmark of acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, whereas confluent demyelination is the hallmark of acute multiple sclerosis. We investigated whether perivenous demyelination versus confluent demyelination distinguishes acute disseminated encephalomyelitis from multiple sclerosis. Patients with perivenous demyelination (n = 13; median age 43 years, range 5-67) on brain biopsy and/or autopsy, ascertained retrospectively, were compared with a cohort with confluent demyelination only (n = 91; 84% multiple sclerosis, 16% isolated syndrome at follow-up; median age 39 years, range 10-69).