Plasmapheresis in fulminant acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Therapeutic Apheresis in Pediatric Patients with Acute CNS Inflammatory Demyelinating Disease

“…To the knowledge of the authors, the number of reported cases of pediatric patients who have been treated with apheresis for an acute severe attack of a CNS demyelinating disease encompasses 9 patients with ADEM and 5 with MS. In all but one case the treatment led to an improvement of symptoms [9,10,11,12,14,20,21]. We report here on our experience with 10 such patients treated since 2007.…”

“…In a recent article on children in US hospitals, 53 patients with diagnosed MS are mentioned, 5 of which were treated with therapeutic PE [8]. However, published experience on the outcome of this treatment is limited to one retrospective study of 6 patients with acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) showing a positive effect of PE and case reports on patients with ADEM or severe attacks of MS [9,10,11,12,13,14]. Therapeutic apheresis is used as an escalation procedure in our center for very severe acute attacks of inflammatory CNS demyelinating disease that fail to respond to steroids.…”

Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis Developed after Mycoplasma Pneumoniae Infection Complicating Subclinical Measles Infection

“…Although no obvious effect was observed in the present case even after steroid and immunoglobulin therapy, the symptoms improved gradually after plasmapheresis. It has been reported that plasmapheresis is effective even for cases of ADEM in which steroid treatment and immunoglobulin therapy are not sufficiently effective (15)(16)(17), and we believe that plasmapheresis should be considered without hesitation for severe ADEM, which responds poorly to steroid treatment.…”

Clinical Efficacy of Plasma-Exchange in Patients with Progressive forms of Multiple Sclerosis and NMO-Spectrum Disease

“…Previous clinical trials testing the efficacy of PLEX in MS have shown variable, though generally positive results and beneficial clinical effects [4,6,7,14,[16][17][18][19][20]. The MS populations in these studies were not similar and the treatment protocols greatly varied.…”