Summary
This paper describes a case of organic mercury poisoning in a child from a mercury‐intoxicated family. The condition has not hitherto been reported among children. The child was poisoned after eating porridge prepared from flour which had been treated with an dkyl mercury compound, panogen, which is used by farmers in seed dressing. The main clinical signs and symptoms are due to severe damage to brain tissue, and thus differ from the parenchymatous lesions resulting from inorganic mercury poisoning. Treatment with BAL was of doubtful value.
In order to study the incidence of diabetic peripheral neuropathy in children, nerve conduction studies and complete neurological examinations were performed on 107 unselected diabetic children below seventeen._xears of age. Motor conduction velocity of the ulnar, median, and peroneal nerves and sensory "conduction velocity" of the median nerves were measured by electromyographical technics. On the basis of the results of the electrophysiological and neurological examinations, eleven patients were considered to have definite evidence of peripheral nerve disease, twenty-three had equivocal findings, and seventythree had no demonstrable abnormalities. The diabetic children with definite evidence of peripheral neuropathy had a longer duration of diabetes mellitus, a later age at onset of the disease, and were older at the time of examination than those patients without evidence of peripheral nerve disease. Those children with neuropathy were also thought to have poorer control of diabetes than those without neuropathy, but this was difficult to evaluate because of the interrelationship of the control factor with the duration of the disease. Three patients were found to have diabetic angiopathy; one had unequivocal, one equivocal and one no signs of neuropathy. DIABETES 15: 411-18, June, 1966. An overwhelming number of reports have appeared about the clinical picture, classification, and incidence of neuropathy in diabetes mellitus. Most of these papers deal with adults only, or do not state whether or not children were included. The scarcity of reports on peripheral neuropathy in diabetic children would suggest a lower incidence of neuropathy in them than in diabetic adults. However, in a study limited to children below sixteen years of age, Lawrence and Locke, 1 over an eighteen-month period, found thirteen diabetics with evidence of neuropathy. Their material was partly selected and contained several patients who were examined because of symptoms relating to the peripheral nervous system. Gamstorp 2 showed that unselected diabetic children had a lower conduction velocity of peripheral nerves than normal age-matched controls. However, this From the
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