Symptom Lesage - a way to identify meningitis in infants

Meningitis is a complex infectious disease that causes damage to the membranes of the brain and spinal cord. This pathology is the tenth most common infectious disease that affects the nervous system.

If meningitis is not treated, it can cause significant complications and consequences, even death.

Diagnosis is an important step on the road to recovery.

Special attention deserve the symptoms inherent exclusively in meningitis. All these reflex syndromes bear the names of the “forefathers” of modern neurology who discovered and described them for the first time many years ago: Kernig, Mondonesi, Flatau, Lesage and others.

A hanging symptom is a specific diagnosis of meningitis only in infants (up to 2 years). In children of this age it is very difficult to determine the presence of meningitis, and the Lesage test was a real discovery in children's neuroscience of that time.

How to check

Symptom Lesage, or hanging, allows you to determine whether there is meningitis in an infant. This research is performed as follows:

  • the doctor takes the infant baby by the axillary fossa (armpits) - with both hands;
  • the back of the head must be held with the index fingers;
  • in such a fixed position, the infant being examined is raised.

If the baby involuntarily tightens the lower limbs to the tummy, bending them in the hip and knee joints, and in such a state holds them for a long time, then this is a positive Lesage syndrome. That is, it indicates the presence of meningitis in a child. In a healthy baby, legs freely move, bend and unbend.

Symptom Lesage - a way to identify meningitis in infants

Also for babies, the symptoms of Trenagine, Fanconi, Meitus are checked, but they are more complex and less informative.

Other meningeal signs

The following important symptoms of meningitis are common to adults and children:

  1. Kernig syndrome. It lies in the fact that the subject can not bend the leg at the knee, if it is already bent at the hip joint.
  2. Reflex Flatau. With a sharp passive (the doctor's hand) flexion of the neck of the patient, the pupils are dilated.
  3. Herman's symptom. While the patient’s head is pressed to the chest by the doctor, the patient is straightening the big toes.
  4. Mondonesi syndrome. When pressing on the eyeballs through the closed eyelids, the patient under examination feels pain, and this is a sign of meningitis.
  5. Symptom Macevovena - a specific “cracked pot sound” is heard when examining the skull with a finger or a percussion hammer.

All these symptoms and specific reflexes are included in the meningeal symptom complex.

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