Mori Masahiro, Koga Michiaki, Yuki Nobuhiro, Hattori Takamichi, Kuwabara Satoshi
Department of Neurology, Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba University, 1-8-1 Inohana, Chuo-ku, Chiba 260-8670, Japan.
J Neuroimmunol. 2008 May 30;196(1-2):143-6. doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroim.2008.02.011. Epub 2008 Apr 11.
Twenty-eight patients suffered Campylobacter jejuni enteritis after eating raw chicken. Among them, only one patient developed Bickerstaff's brainstem encephalitis, who carried anti-GQ1b IgG antibodies. In contrast, none of the others did the autoantibodies. C. jejuni was cultured from all stool samples from five patients with enteritis alone. All the isolates had the same genotype, cst-II (Asn51), which are characteristic of strains isolated from Bickerstaff's brainstem encephalitis. These findings suggest that host susceptibility may play a role in inducing the production of anti-ganglioside antibodies and the development of Bickerstaff's brainstem encephalitis.
