Unusual emboli, and software versus hardware - Case Reports December 2025

About this episode

The episode discusses intriguing case reports involving unusual emboli and functional neurological disorders.

Another set of intriguing cases from the latest issue of the journal, pored over by the Case Reports team. In the first case, a 24-yo man presents acutely with reduced consciousness, following 3 days of right-sided headache. His mother reports sudden behavioural changes with jerky movements and enlarged pupils. He is agitated, not obeying commands and not moving his left-side limbs. He had a history of autism and vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and was on medication for stroke prevention. An MRI scan led to a differential diagnosis of Posterior Reversible Encephalopathy Syndrome (PRES), but the final conclusion came post-discharge after a further review of his scans. https://pn.bmj.com/content/25/6/549 The second report (19:37) describes two curious instances of functional neurological disorder (FND), both of which improved after the patients were in comatose states. The first patient is a 59-yo man who had developed muscle weakness shortly after at car crash at age 49, and had subsequently been reliant on a wheelchair for more than 8 years. Recently the patient had been infected simultaneously with severe cases of flu and COVID-19, during which he had been sedated and placed in…

Topics covered

• case reports
• neurology
• functional neurological disorder
• medical diagnosis
• patient recovery

Keywords

• emboli
• neurology
• case reports
• PRES
• FND
• patient recovery
• MRI
• autism
• Ehlers-Danlos syndrome

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Case Reports team, BMJ Group

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