Some professionals believe that giving a clinical diagnosis based only on the presence the three classic symptoms has caused many patients to be misdiagnosed. For instance, Harper, Giles, and Finlay-Jones (1986) carried out autopsies on 97 people, 64 of whom were not diagnosed with Wernicke’s until after death. Of the 33 people who were diagnosed before death, 37% presented with all three symptoms in the triad. For the people who were not diagnosed prior to death, 34% had only one of the classic symptoms, mental status change, while 27% of the patients did not have any of the classic symptoms. The literature up until that point stated explicitly that a person would present with all three symptoms if they had Wernicke’s. The researchers for
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One study looked into how often Wernicke’s encephalopathy was diagnosed in patients at the Royal Perth Hospital in Australia. The researchers were allowed to examine the brains of 2,891 patients who either died at the hospital or were housed in the Perth City coroner office over a four year period from 1973 to 1976. The researchers examined several sections of each brain and crossed checked their findings with the medical records available at the hospital to see if there was any significance to what they found. Out of the 2891 brains they examined, 51 were diagnosed with Wernicke’s encephalopathy, which is about a 1.7% prevalence rate. Out of these 51 cases, only 7 were diagnosed with Wernicke’s encephalopathy before death. 45 of these people were alcoholics prior to death and one was not an alcoholic, but severely malnourished. The remaining 5 did not have enough information in their medical history to ascertain the reason why Wernicke’s encephalopathy developed. The most common cause of death in this study was bronchopneumonia which occurred in 16 of the patients followed by hemorrhagic brainstem lesions which are common to Wernicke’s encephalopathy and remained undiagnosed until after death. The author’s conclusion was that there is a higher prevalence of Wernicke’s encephalopathy than what is diagnosed. They hypothesized that the reason behind this could be that the expected triad of symptoms might not be severe enough to be obvious in a clinical
One study looked into how often Wernicke’s encephalopathy was diagnosed in patients at the Royal Perth Hospital in Australia. The researchers were allowed to examine the brains of 2,891 patients who either died at the hospital or were housed in the Perth City coroner office over a four year period from 1973 to 1976. The researchers examined several sections of each brain and crossed checked their findings with the medical records available at the hospital to see if there was any significance to what they found. Out of the 2891 brains they examined, 51 were diagnosed with Wernicke’s encephalopathy, which is about a 1.7% prevalence rate. Out of these 51 cases, only 7 were diagnosed with Wernicke’s encephalopathy before death. 45 of these people were alcoholics prior to death and one was not an alcoholic, but severely malnourished. The remaining 5 did not have enough information in their medical history to ascertain the reason why Wernicke’s encephalopathy developed. The most common cause of death in this study was bronchopneumonia which occurred in 16 of the patients followed by hemorrhagic brainstem lesions which are common to Wernicke’s encephalopathy and remained undiagnosed until after death. The author’s conclusion was that there is a higher prevalence of Wernicke’s encephalopathy than what is diagnosed. They hypothesized that the reason behind this could be that the expected triad of symptoms might not be severe enough to be obvious in a clinical