Encephalitis and Meningitis - What is the Difference?

Encephalitis and Meningitis - What is the Difference?

Encephalitis is a disease that occurs to your brain sometimes after having a viral infection, like the chickenpox, the flu, measles, mumps, Mono, and even cold sores. What it does is causes your brain to become inflamed. The swelling can lead to damaged nerve cells, bleeding in your brain, and eventually lead to brain damage.
Meningitis on the other hand is a disease that effects the tissues that are around the brain and the spinal cord. It is caused by either a viral or bacterial illness and creates inflammation in those tissues. It has been found to often follow things such as a sinus infection or in your infection, or in some instances a viral illness.

How Alzheimer's Disease Is Diagnosed

How Alzheimer's Disease Is Diagnosed

Alzheimer's disease is a condition in which the brain undergoes shrinkage in key areas, affecting memory, thinking and behavior. The symptoms progress so slowly that the changes are difficult to pinpoint over time, and it usually takes an outsider or a person that is not around the individual to suggest a doctor visit. It is classified as the most common form of dementia, which can interfere with daily life as it causes severe loss of intellectual capability and memory.
By taking the time to discover if an individual's inconvenient symptoms are truly caused by Alzheimer's, several things can be accomplished. Most importantly, the fear of the unknown will be destroyed. This fear causes anxiety in some patients and anger in others. If the time is taken to discuss the symptoms with a doctor, one of two things will be accomplished: the doctor will tell the patient that the symptoms are due to other causes or he will confirm that it is indeed Alzheimer's disease.

Infection of the Central Nervous System - Brain Abscess (Suppurative Encephalitis)

Infection of the Central Nervous System - Brain Abscess (Suppurative Encephalitis)

Diagnosis: In any patient having one of the underlying causes, features suggestive of meningitis, raised intracranial tension or focal neurological deficit should suggest the possibility or brain abscess. Lumbar puncture should not be routinely done in such cases since the risk or coning is high. Moreover the CSF may not show diagnostic changes in the case of localized abscess.
The diagnosis can be confirmed by CT Scan which should be done of an early stage. X-ray skull may give evidence of sinusitis and rarely gas in the abscess cavity, if the abscess is caused by gas-producing organisms or the abscess is communicating with the paranasal sinuses.
Course and prognosis: If left untreated, brain abscess is fatal. Complications include rupture into cerebral ventricles producing ventriculitis, meningitis, rise in intracranial tension and secondary epilepsy. If the abscess is diagnosed early and treated, full recovery may occur. Mortality is higher in brain abscess complicating congenital heart disease. The overall mortality in large series is 11-15%.

Blood Cancer - Causes and Treatment

Blood is a part of the body. Blood has different components sch as red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. The red blood cells (RBC), platelets also called monocytes because it is belong to the "myeloid" group and other white blood cells belong to the "lymphoid" group. Lymphoid cells are affected. Disease progresses quickly. This is most common among children. Blood cancer or Leukemia is actually a group of diseases, each of which impede with the normal functioning of blood cells and progressively weaken the system. Leukemia is classified as either Acute or Chronic. Blood and urine samples may also be tested for various substances, called tumor markers, which may indicate cancer.
Causes
A weakened immune system - this may be a result of drugs that suppress the immune system (such as those used for organ transplants), high doses of radiation (such as in radiotherapy for another cancer), or diseases that affect the immune system (such as HIV).
Treatment
In radio immunotherapy, an immunotoxin--a hybrid molecule formed by coupling an antibody molecule to a toxin--is injected into the patient.