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A 28-year-old woman experienced a confusional attack with hallucinations associated with moderate motor deficiency of the lower limbs during treatment with disulfiram 1 g/day. Later on, a temporary increase in disulfiram dosage to 1.75 g/day was followed by quadriplegia and paralysis of the facial and glosso-pharyngeal nerves. Paralysis regressed rapidly in the cranial and upper limb areas, but very slowly in the lower limbs. Disulfiram-induced peripheral neuropathies are not uncommon. They may take various forms, such as optic neuritis, polyneuritis of the limbs and, exceptionally, severe multiple paralysis with psychic disorders, as in the case reported here.

Clinical and pathological findings in three adults with toxoplasmosis of the central nervous system are reported. Symptoms and signs in the first patient, a Haitian woman who had lived in France for 2 years, were suggestive of a right hemispheric space-occupying process. The second case was a woman treated for Hodgkin's disease who showed symptoms and signs of a meningoencephalitis. The presenting lesion in case 3 mimicked a tumor of the posterior fossa. Analysis of these 3 cases and of those previously reported underlines: 1) diagnostic difficulties, particularly in immunodepressed patients; 2) the effectiveness of immunoperoxidase for pathological diagnosis; 3) the poor prognosis due to absence of a specific treatment.

A 39 year-old man with mild stable mental retardation, without family history, developed progressively a gait disturbance and intellectual deterioration. CT scan showed a low density of the periventricular hemispheric white matter which increased on subsequent examinations. Eight months before death he presented with several Grand Mal seizures. He died 29 months after the onset of the clinical disorders. Neuropathological studies included light and electron microscopy of a cerebral biopsy and a post-mortem examination of the brain. It showed a sudanophilic leukodystrophy with unusual features: cavitation of the white matter, oligodendrocyte proliferation and lamellar "fingerprint" dense cytoplasmic inclusions in the oligodendrocytes. Only 3 similar cases have been previously reported.