Neuro-Behçet’s disease with chorea after remission of intestinal Behçet’s disease

Abstract

Neuro-Behçet’s disease shows various neuropsychiatric symptoms, but chorea has rarely been reported. We report a case of neuro-Behçet’s disease in a 67-year-old woman with depression and chorea that occurred 22 years after the onset of intestinal Behçet’s disease. Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using a fluid-attenuated inversion-recovery (FLAIR) sequence demonstrated lesions more clearly than did T₂-weighted MRI. Some of the lesions appeared as small ring-like foci, i.e. low-intensity spots rimmed with remarkable hyperintense signals, in the periventricular white matter and basal ganglia. A review of the literature revealed that the onset of chorea in cases of Behçet’s disease varied from the time of onset of Behçet’s disease to 31 years after onset of the disease. Psychiatric manifestations have often been associated with neuro-Behçet’s disease. In the present patient, treatment with prednisolone resolved the chorea, suggesting that the chorea was caused by an autoimmune mechanism. It seems likely that the long-term development of vasculitis in patients with Behçet’s disease results in the formation of these particular brain lesions on FLAIR MR images. Chorea should be taken into consideration as one of the manifestations of Behçet’s disease, even many years after remission of the disease.