title: Sudden death of an infant with 'an early epileptic encephalopathy'.
abstract: This article reports an autopsy case of sudden death of an infant with an infrequent encephalopathy involving epileptic episodes. The infant was a 1-year and 10-month-old boy, who had a history of the first convulsive seizures in the third month after birth. The clinical diagnosis was described as 'an early infantile epileptic encephalopathy with suppression-bursts' (Ohtahara syndrome). On a winter day, he was collapsed following a high fever and was already dead on the arrival at a hospital. The body was small for the age and poorly nourished. The autopsy and postmortem magnetic resonance imaging scan (MRI) of formalin-fixed brain revealed advanced unsymmetric brain atrophy with cortical dysplasia, which were prominent in the left temporal and right occipital lobes, and sclerotic atrophy of the parahippocampal gyri, additionally showing a feature of the olivo-ponto-cerebellar atrophy. However, the cause of death was pathologically and microbiologically determined as bacterial bronchopneumonia following pulmonary infection of the influenza A virus. In sudden death cases of physically handicapped infants, the investigation of viral infection in consideration of an epidemiological survey is important even when the death can be pathomorphologically explained.
authors.affiliation: Department of Legal Medicine, Osaka City University Medical School, Asahi-machi 1-4-3, Abeno, Osaka 545-8585, Japan. legalmed@med.osaka-cu.ac.jp
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Quan
authors.forename: B L
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ishida
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Taniguchi
authors.forename: D R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kamikodai
authors.forename: M Q
authors.initials: MQ
authors.lastname: Fujita
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Maeda
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D001996:Bronchopneumonia / Q000503:physiopathology; D002423:Cause of Death; D004827:Epilepsy / Q000473:pathology*; D017809:Fatal Outcome; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male