This is one of the first projects that I was involved with from start to finish since my start in Berlin to be published, so I’m quite content with it. A cool landmark after a year in Berlin.

Together with TL and LN I supervised a student from the Netherlands (JH). This publication is the result of all the work JH did, together with the great medical knowledge from the rest of the team. About the research: Posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome, or PRES, is a syndrome that can have stroke like symptoms, but in fact has got nothing to do with it. The syndrome was recognised as a separate entity only a couple of years ago, and this group of patients that we collected from the Charite is one of the largest collections in the world.

It is a syndrome characterised by edema (being either vasogenic or cytotoxic), suggesting there is something wrong with the fluid balance in the brain. A good way to learn more about the fluids in the brain is to take a look at the different things you can measure in the cerebrospinal fluid. The aim of this paper was therefore to see to what extend the edema, but also other patients characteristics, was associated with CSF parameters.

Our main conclusion is indeed the total amount of protein in the CSF is elevated in most PRES patients, and that severe edema grade was associated with more CSF. Remind yourself that this is basically a case series (with some follow up) but CSF is therefore measured during diagnosis and only in a selection of the patients. Selection bias is therefore likely to be affecting our results as well as the possibility of reverse causation. Next to that, research into “syndromes” is always complicated as they are a man-made concept. This problem we also encountered in the RATIO analyses about the antiphospholipid syndrome (Urbanus, Lancet Neurol 2009): a real syndrome diagnosis could not be given, as that requires two blood draws with 3 months time in between which is not possible in this case-control study. But still, there is a whole lot of stuff to learn about the syndromes in our clinical research projects.

I think this is also true for the PRES study: I think that our results show that it is justified to do a prospective and rigorous and standardised analyses of these patients with the dangerous syndrome. More knowledge on the causes and consequences is needed!

The paper can be cited as:

Neeb L, Hoekstra J, Endres M, Siegerink B, Siebert E, Liman TG. Spectrum of cerebral spinal fluid findings in patients with posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome. J Neurol; 2015; (e-pub) and can be found on pubmed or on my mendeley profile