Clinical, electrophysiologic and neuroimaging findings in Wernicke's syndrome

Wernicke's encephalopathy is a disease that when not diagnosed in time, can lead to severe CNS damage and death. It is characterized by specific clinical and radiologic findings; however, there are few reports dealing with the usefulness of neurophysiologic studies in this syndrome. We present a patient with Wernicke's encephalopathy, diagnosed postmortem on autopsy, in whom the neurophysiologic studies showed abnormalities in all the different pathways tested. This suggests that EEG and evoked potentials may be useful tools in the diagnostic workup of this entity. We propose performing these tests when this syndrome is being considered.