ACUTE HEMICEREBELLITIS IN ADULTS: LITERATURE REVIEW AND PERSONAL OBSERVATION

Abstract

Acute cerebellitis is a common inflammatory syndrome typically occurring in children and only on very rare occasions in adults. Thus, there was no description of acute cerebellitis, associated with Crohn’s disease, found in Russian sources of literature. We reported a case of acute cerebellitis in 45-year-old woman with a long history of Crohn’s disease treated with Mesalazine as a basic therapy and a resection of ileotransversoanastomosis together with small intestine two months before the onset of neurological symptoms. She first presented with severe headache and left-sided cerebellar dysfunction. The MRI showed signs of pronounced edema of the left hemisphere of the cerebellum, pial Gd-enhancement along the cerebellar folia, difficulty of CSF- flow. The application of lumbar puncture was impeded by the possibility of complications, such as brain herniation. Treatment with high-dose intravenous Methylprednisolone resulted in clinical and radiological improvement. Over the following year, her clinical status remained unchanged, except for one case of epileptic seizures as a result of switching of basic therapy of Crohn’s disease on Adalimumab. In this case, hemicerebellitis most likely has an immune-mediated nature. The temporal relationship with increased activity of Crohn’s disease and a significant positive response to corticosteroid therapy favored this hypothesis. It was known that inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) had many extra-intestinal manifestations including neurological ones. With regard to that, the alterations in gut microbiota could be a possible common base for systemic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn’s disease or autoimmune cerebellitis, described in this study.