As mentioned in the section on hyponatremia, a rapid rise in serum osmolality to normal or higher-than-normal levels is an almost obligate antecedent of this process. One encounters this most commonly in the rapid correction of hyponatremia. In cases related to the correction of hyponatremia, the initial serum sodium concentration is less than 130 mEq/L and usually much lower; this was the case in all the patients reported by Burcar and colleagues and by Karp and Laureno. Laureno (1983) demonstrated the importance of serum sodium in the pathogenesis of this disease experimentally. Dogs made severely hyponatremic (100 to 115 mEq/L) had the electrolyte disorder corrected rapidly by infusion of hypertonic (3 percent) saline; this led to spastic quadriparesis and pontine and extrapontine lesions were found at autopsy, indistinguishable in their distribution and histologic features from those of the human disease. Hyponatremia alone or slowly corrected hyponatremia (<15 mEq/dL in the initial 24 h) did not produce the disease.
McKee and colleagues adduced that in burn patients, extreme serum hyperosmolality was the important factor in the pathogenesis of demyelination. They found the characteristic pontine and extrapontine lesions in 10 of 139 severely burned patients who were examined after death. Each of their patients with CPM had suffered a prolonged, nonterminal episode of severe serum hyperosmolality, which coincided temporally with the onset of the lesion, as judged by its histologic features. Hyponatremia was not prominent and no other independent features could explain the changes. These observations suggest that rapidly rising osmolarity may be a cause of the osmotic demyelination syndromes. The pathogenesis is not known but all one can say is that specific myelinated regions of the brain, most often but not exclusively the center of the base of the pons, have a susceptibility to rapid increase in serum osmolality.
Karp and Laureno, on the basis of their experience and that of Sterns and colleagues, have suggested that to avoid CPM the hyponatremia be corrected by no more than 10 mEq/L in the initial 24 h and by no more than about 21 mEq/L in the initial 48 h. Current recommendations are even more conservative—that the rate of correction of hyponatremia should not exceed 6 to 8 mEq/L over any 24-hour period.
These syndromes are usually of mixed type; that is, they include a number of basal ganglionic and cerebellar symptoms in various combinations. They emerge as part of acquired chronic hepatocerebral degeneration or chronic hypoparathyroidism or as sequels to kernicterus, hypoxic, or hypoglycemic encephalopathy. The basal ganglionic–cerebellar symptoms that result from severe anoxia and hypoglycemia were described in the preceding section and in Chaps. 4 and 5. Kernicterus and calcification of the basal ganglia and cerebellum are considered in Chap. 36 and further on in this chapter. Acquired hypoparathyroidism may also lead to calcification of the basal ganglia and an extrapyramidal disorder. Choreiform movements are also observed in patients with hyperosmolar coma and with severe hyperthyroidism, ascribed by Weiner and Klawans to a disturbance of dopamine metabolism.