Osteomyelitis in Gaucher disease.

A relatively common complication of Gaucher disease, the so-called crisis, frequently is difficult to differentiate from acute osteomyelitis. We reviewed the cases of forty-nine patients with Gaucher disease who were treated at the Massachusetts General Hospital and found that eleven patients had required admission to the hospital for an acute symptom complex that represented either a crisis or an infection. Five of the patients proved to have acute hematogenous osteomyelitis. The delayed diagnosis of the infection in three of the patients with osteomyelitis led to an unsatisfactory outcome.