CNS Infections: Introduction

00:01 Hello. Let's continue taking a look at neuropathology.

00:04 Here, the overall theme will be CNS infections.

00:07 With CNS infections, these are the topics that we'll take a look at.

00:11 For the most part, it comes under microbiology, and what is the pathologic approach that you wanna take with CNS infections will be overall themed.

00:22 We'll walk through quickly some bacterial, viral, fungal, mycobacterial, referring to tuberculosis, spirochetes, referring to the lime disease, parasitic, and ultimately prion disease.

00:35 Prion itself, as you know in microbiology, there's a lot of research in terms of how it behaves.

00:41 It's quite interesting because it is considered to be contagious but nonetheless, it's difficult to understand the behavior of this prion disease as you've heard of mad cow disease, for an example.

00:55 The classifications we'll take a look at under meningitis -- as I said the overall theme for this is going to be CNS infections but under meningitis, apart from the infectious agents, may be bacterial, viral, or fungal, whatnot. There will be other causes of meningitis.

01:14 That is not so much infectious, just keep that in mind as we walk through more of these issues.

01:19 Now, what's the difference between meningitis and encephalitis? Well, from neuroanatomy, remember that the meninges, well, if they undergo infectious changes that -- and undergoes an inflammatory process and then, of course, the lumbar puncture and evaluation of your cerebrospinal fluid becomes incredibly important. But what's underneath the meninge? What's underneath that pia mater? We have the brain parenchyma.

01:48 What if the brain parenchyma then becomes injured and undergoes an inflammatory process? Well, at this point, you call this encephalitis. We'll take a look at various causes of encephalitides.

02:01 Myelitis, referring to your spinal cord and then quickly walk you through some important abscess information.