Cerebral sparganosis in mainland Chinese patients

Sparganosis of the brain: a case report and brief review

“…Sparganosis can migrate to various tissues and organs, such as subcutaneous connective tissue, muscle, breast, lungs and the central nervous system [2] . Reported cerebral sparganosis cases are quite small compared to other site sparganosis, but according to Hong et al [18] the prevalence of cerebral sparganosis was underestimated, many cases were not reported. In addition, a lot of Asian patients were reported with local language rather than English.…”

“…Due to the small wounds, stereotactic aspiration is recommended by most neurosurgeons. In the 26 cerebral sparganosis cases of Hong et al [18] , 16 of them were treated with craniotomy, 7 of them were treated with stereotactic aspiration and another 3 were treated with praziquantel only. None of them experienced a relapse of the disease.…”

“…Fever is not a common symptom. Lesions are mainly located at frontal-partial lobes but invasion to cerebellums are also reported in very few cases [18] . Diagnosis of cerebral sparganosis is relatively hard since it has no specific manifestations.…”

“…The disease can also be diagnosed with antigen specified IgG antibodies from blood and CSF samples, although cross-reactivity with other infestations or clonorchiasis limititsspecificity [13,18] . In our case, the first CSF sample was negative for immune-reactivity but positive for blood sample, however, the second blood and CSF sample were both positive.…”

“…Yu et al [13] reported in 8 of 9 cases of cerebral sparganosis patients underwent a craniotomy due to lack of stereotactic equipment, with 1 patient dying due to unspecified reason. Both investigators reported that symptom duration more than one year indicated worse prognosisafter surgery [13,18] . In our case, we used a navigation guided craniotomy to resect the granuloma as well as the peri-lesion glia proliferation zone.…”