Inflammatory Diseases of the Brain (Medical Radiology/Diagnostic Imaging). S. Hähnel, ed. Springer; 2009, 240 pages, 352 illustrations, $109.00.
Inflammatory and infectious diseases are often part of the differential diagnosis of brain pathology, particularly in immunocompromised individuals. Neuroimaging, specifically advanced techniques such as diffusion-weighted MR imaging and MR spectroscopy, might contribute much to the differentiation of various brain infections, especially, from other neoplastic diseases.
Inflammatory Diseases of the Brain is a comprehensive book with extensive coverage of these diseases in both children and adults. It starts with a chapter on multiple sclerosis and other demyelinating disorders, followed by a chapter on vasculitis. It then covers various pyogenic and infectious diseases. There is also a chapter on infections unique to children. The book ends with a short chapter on the use of state-of-the-art techniques such as MR spectroscopy, diffusion tensor, and perfusion imaging. There are also specific imaging protocol recommendations.
For reading ease, every chapter is uniformly divided into 3 sections: epidemiology, clinical presentation and therapy, and imaging and differential diagnosis. There are numerous informative high-quality illustrations, including photomicrographs, throughout the book, which is unique and one of the highlights.
This book is edited by S. Ha¨hnel who is a well-recognized authority in the field of neuroradiology with contributions from approximately 20 other distinguished authors. Thus, the readers can be assured of accurate information with a wide variety of pathology in high-quality images. This is probably the first and the only book on inflammatory diseases of the brain in the medical literature as of now. Generally, these diseases are assigned a small chapter in neuroradiology textbooks. Therefore, this comprehensive review comes as a refreshing and much-needed change on this important subject.
To see if this book was truly thorough, I looked up a few uncommon (but not so rare) entities such as Tolosa-Hunt syndrome, lymphocytic hypophysitis, primary angitis of the central nervous system, Behc¸et disease, nocardia, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Not surprisingly, every one of these entities was extensively described and accompanied, in most cases, by illustrations. In fact, in an era when CJD is becoming more prevalent, the authors have done well to include an entire chapter on this entity with excellent illustrations.
This book would have been truly complete if inflammatory/infectious diseases of the spine were included. The authors may have considered this option but were possibly constrained by space restrictions because this subject would probably entail another book in itself. To conclude, Inflammatory Diseases of the Brain should serve as an excellent reference book not only for the neuroradiologist but also for other radiologists and those in other clinical specialties such as neurology, neurosurgery, infectious diseases, and internal medicine.
