Erdheim-Chester Disease with a Posterior Fossa Tumour Mimicking Neurosarcoidosis: A Case Report
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Its CNS involvement is relatively common, around 50%, and can mimic various intra and extra-axial lesions generating a widespread of neurological manifestations and/or complications such as diabetes insipidus and hydrocephalus. Its diagnosis is achieved by pathological examination, imaging findings and genetic studies. On the other hand, neurosarcoidosis is an uncommon manifestation of sarcoidosis seen in about 5-35% of patients with sarcoidosis, occasionally presented in isolation without signs of systemic illness. It’s CNS compromise includes meningeal, cranial nerves, hypothalamus, spinal cord or peripheral nerve involvement showing granulomatous infiltrates in the pathology. Its diagnosis requires all clinical histological, imaging, and laboratory test support, and given its broad clinical spectrum, it is considered one of the great imitators, masquerading itself as other diseases becoming a challenging diagnosis come by, as well as a powerful confusing factor as seen in our case, initially considered to be a posterior fossa tumour. The MRI showed that the posterior fossa lesion was isointense in those T1 and T2-weighted images with high contrast enhancement, and the orbit lesions were hypointense in the same sequences, this finding it’s not specific for neither of the conditions mentioned above. Both present with a meningeal enhancement and hyperintense lesions on the FLAIR sequences. For neurosarcoidosis the imaging findings can be classified according to Christoforidis GA, et al. in six categories, being: dural thickening or mass, leptomeningeal involvement, enhancing brain parenchymal lesion, non enhancing brain parenchymal lesion, cranial nerve involvement and spinal cord and root involvement. In our case the patient did not fit just one of the categories mentioned above given that her lesion had both dural thickening or mass and cranial nerve involvement.