What are the typical symptoms of viral encephalitis in children?

Children are a high-risk group for viral encephalitis, which is particularly harmful to their health and may even have lifelong effects. If they are not treated in time, it can easily lead to some mental disorders, memory loss, and thinking disorders. Some children are prone to impaired consciousness after the onset of the disease, which can cause damage to the cerebral hemispheres and cause the children to suffer from epilepsy and other relatively serious hazards.

1. Mental disorder type

The main manifestations of this type of children are emotional disorders (emotional indifference, depression, euphoria, fear), intellectual disabilities (decreased comprehension, memory, calculation, judgment, associative ability, etc.), thinking disorders (mutism, polyglotia, incoherent speech, delusions) and behavioral disorders (reduced or increased movements, impulsivity, stupor), etc.

2. Coma type

After the onset of the disease, the child quickly develops severe impaired consciousness, manifested as varying degrees of coma or impaired consciousness. In patients with damage to both cerebral hemispheres, the symptoms are decorticate state and coma with eyes open; when the upper brainstem is damaged, decerebrate rigidity occurs; when the basal ganglia are damaged, extrapyramidal involuntary movements such as tremor and chorea may occur.

3. Brain tumor type

The children mainly show symptoms of increased intracranial pressure and compression, such as headache, vomiting, papilledema, paralysis, partial motor epileptic seizures, etc., accompanied by varying degrees of impaired consciousness. Although these symptoms mimic those of intracranial space-occupying lesions, they have an acute onset and rapidly worsen, with the duration from onset to peak of symptoms sometimes being only a few hours, and most times within a month; intracranial pressure increases dramatically.

4. Epilepsy type

The child's clinical manifestations are very similar to epilepsy, but there is no history of epilepsy before the onset of the disease. Common types of seizures include generalized tonic-clonic seizures and their continuum, partial motor seizures, complex partial seizures, or mixed seizures. Patients of this type all have epileptic seizures as the main symptom after the onset of the disease. Some patients may have prodromal symptoms such as fever, headache, dizziness, vomiting, and decreased active activity before the onset of epileptic seizures.

5. Limited

The child's lesion is located in a certain part of the brain, or in the cerebellum or brain stem. The main clinical manifestations are hemiplegia, monoplegia, crossed paralysis, quadriplegia, motor ataxia, involuntary extrapyramidal movements, cranial nerve damage, etc. Differentiate from cerebrovascular disease, brain tumor, and multiple sclerosis based on the severity of onset, disease progression, cerebrospinal fluid examination, CT or MRI, and response to experimental treatment.