Abstract

MELANO CARRANZA, EFRÉN; CARRILLO MARAVILLA, EDUARDO; GULIAS HERRERO, ALFONSO  and  AVILA FUNES, JOSÉ ALBERTO. Síndrome de Guillain-Barré en el anciano: un estudio retrospectivo. Arch. Neurocien. (Mex., D.F.) [online]. 2004, vol.9, n.2, pp.76-79. ISSN 1028-5938.

Introduction: Guillian-Barré syndrome (GBS) is the main cause of flaccid paralysis. Its outcome is generally good. But a non negligible percentage of cases have severe neurologic deficits and the mortality is around 1-3%. Objective: recognize the clinical picture and outcome of GBS in the elderly and make a comparison with younger patients. Patients and methods: we search for patients with a diagnosis of GBS from 1995 to 2002 and retrospectively reviewed the charts. Patients were divided into two groups: the patients aged 60 and older (group 1) and under 60 years (group 2). We compared socio-demographic characteristics, clinical course, lumbar puncture results, treatment, and outcome. Results: mean age in group 1 was 65.8 years (range 62-72) and 35.6 years in group 2 (range 17-56). We found no difference regarding sex, clinical picture at presentation, trigger cause, lumbar puncture findings, need of mechanical ventilation and rate of improvement. The main complication in both groups was pneumonia (P=0.704). We found that 60% patients of group 1 had at least one relapse compared with 3% in group 2 (P<0.001). Discussion: clinical picture did not differ between younger and older patients. Nevertheless, we found a high relapse rate in the elderly group. There are no clear explanations for these results. We hypothesized that since GBS has an autoimmune basis it is plausible to ascribe this differences to the altered immunity seen in the elderly; this assumption and ours results remain to be confirmed.

Keywords : Guillain-Barré syndrome; polyneuropathy; elderly; secueles.