Acute Spinal Epidural Abscess vs Acute Transverse Myelopathy

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Abstract
A number of excellent review articles on the diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of spinal epidural abscess are available.1-7Since Dandy's classic paper in 1926,1reports on this subject have uniformly stressed the importance of early diagnosis and prompt laminectomy in such cases, and the present paper is in agreement with this point of view. The available literature has not stressed, however, and often has failed to mention that the clinical picture usually associated with acute spinal epidural abscess may be closely and sometimes exactly simulated by patients with acute transverse myelopathy, a poorly understood syndrome which occurs with considerably greater frequency than spinal epidural abscess. The importance of a diagnostic distinction between these two entities is obvious since neurosurgical intervention in cases of transverse myelopathy would rarely, if ever, be of benefit. It is the purpose of this paper, therefore, to emphasize the similarities between these two syndromes

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