An Experimental Study of Aspergillary Infection in the Central Nervous System

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During the past several years, there has been an increase of interest in fungal infections of the central nervous system, but with regard to aspergillary infection in the brain, it is relatively uncommon. Consequently, the pathogenesis and morphological characteristics have not been clarified as yet, because of the paucity of the autopsy cases.
In this paper, the author tended to investigate the intracranial lesions of rabbits produced by intravenous injection of Aspergillus fumigatus. Acute lesions are usually manifested as rapidly spreading suppurative leptomeningitis, chorioditis and intracerebral abscesses which are initially formed around the cortical arterial branches with fungal embolism. Later on the inflammatory process spreads widely through the pia-glial or ependimo-glial membrane and is further extended by the confluence of multiple disseminated lesions. Circulatory disturbance also plays a role in the destruction of the brain tissue with or without remarkable inflammatory reaction. Besides suppurative or necrotic inflammatory lesions, proliferative or productive changes of glial or other mesenchymal elements are also encountered in a few examples, although these are usually localized. The neurons in the lesions are often compressed or destroyed by growing filamentous organisms, and this process is tentatively described as “mycotic neuronophagy”.