Abstract
All physicians, regardless of their medical specialty or the setting in which they treat patients, must be able to perform a neurologic examination. In the outpatient office, up to 9 to 10% of all symptoms suggest the possibility of neurologic disease and up to 5% of emergency department visits are due to primary neurologic disease. The neurologic examination is critical in triaging these patients, selecting diagnostic tests, and indicating management. This review covers how to think about the neurologic examination, the screening examination, and diagnosis-focused neurologic examinations with an emphasis on stroke, epilepsy, encephalopathy and coma, neurodegenerative diseases, neuromuscular disease, and functional disorders. The figure shows a conceptual approach to the neurologic examination. The tables list components of the screening neurologic examination, neurologic examination focus points for suspected stroke and suspected epilepsy, lateralization and localization of common seizure semiologies, and neurologic examination focus points for encephalopathy/coma, suspected neurodegenerative disease, suspected neuromuscular disease, and suspected functional neurologic disorders. This review contains 1 figure, 13 tables, and 14 references Keywords: Neurologic examination, neurodegenerative disease, neuromuscular disease, neurologic screening
Published Version
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