El sindrome neural leprosa, ensayo de sistematizacion.

Abstract

The author is the medical superintendent of the leper colony of San Pablo at Loreto, Peru. He reports his studies on the involvement of the nervous system in 400 of these patients. The text and tables are in Spanish, with an eleven-page summary in English. For the most part, the statistics presented corroborate those appearing elsewhere in the literature. Some, however, are of special interest in pointing up nervous system involvement. Leprosy started in 54.7% of these 400 patients with neural symptoms, and 85% of these were disorders of sensation, temperature sense being first affected, with defects in pain and touch sensation following. Disorders of taste, smell, or hearing were not observed. Vision was frequently altered, not because of lesions of the optic nerve but because of lesions of the anterior part of the eye. Four stages in the evolution of sensory defects in leprosy are outlined: First, temperature sense