Rasmussen syndrome
rare inflammatory neurological disease
Rasmussen syndrome, also known as Rasmussen's encephalitis, is a rare progressive autoimmune neurological disease. It is characterized by frequent and severe focal seizures, progressive neurological decline, hemiparesis (weakness on one side of the body), encephalitis, and unilateral cerebral atrophy. The disease primarily affects children under the age of 15, though adult cases have been reported. It was originally described as a form of chronic focal motor epilepsy by Dr. A. Ya. Kozhevnikov in the 1880s and separately identified as focal seizures due to chronic localized encephalitis in the 1950s by Dr. Theodore Rasmussen. It is now classified to be a cytotoxic T-cell–mediated encephalitis.
Signs and symptoms
The hallmark symptoms are focal seizures, particularly epilepsia partialis continua (EPC), a form of epilepsy characterized by continuous or near-continuous clonic movements in a localized body part. These seizures are typically resistant to standard anti-epileptic medications and often mark the early stage of the disease.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rasmussen syndrome” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.