Clinical Spectrum of Guillain-Barré Syndrome

Review Article

J Korean Assoc EMG Electrodiagn Med 2014;16(1):7-13.
Published online June 30, 2014.

Received: 3 June 2014 • Accepted: 3 June 2014

Abstract

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is an acute post-infectious, immune-mediated peripheral neuropathy presenting with various clinical and electrophysiological features. Over the past 20 years, the concept of this syndrome was considerably changed. The classical triad of GBS - ascending paralysis, areflexia, and albumin-cytological dissociation - are not always essential in current diagnosis of GBS. From a clinical view, recently GBS can be arbitrarily categorized as “typical type” (acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, acute motor axonal neuropathy, or acute motor sensory axonal neuropathy) and “variant type” (Fisher syndrome, Bickerstaff’s brainstem encephalitis, pharyngeal-cervical-brachial type, and sensory or ataxic variants, etc.). Clinicians need to be familiar with typical clinical features of GBS and have full knowledge about various clinical spectrum of GBS variants. This article briefly review regarding these issues focusing on the recent literature and provide some clues for the better understanding of overall clinical spectrums of GBS.

Key Words: Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), Clinical, Variant