Monday, September 11, 2017

Guest Post from Dr. PJ Cimino: Blue discoloration of the gray matter in a patient who received methylene blue for respiratory distress prior to death

Dr. PJ Cimino, whom we profiled when he was a fellow back in November of 2013, is a now faculty member at the University of Washington. I was delighted to receive this email from him today:

"I had an autopsy case with interesting gross pathology findings, which made for some nice clinical images (below). The patient received therapeutic methylene blue in the setting of respiratory distress prior to death. The gross pathology showed striking widespread green-blue gray matter discoloration. I thought these images might be of interest to share with the general neuropatholgy community, and thought your blog might be a good platform to do so, especially since you have posted many good clinical images."




2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for this post. We had one of these a few months ago and speculated it was due to methylene blue as well.

Jared said...

Great post and photos! We had a similar case about a month ago. Curious if anyone knows how to visualize the discoloration microscopically? The methylene blue seems to be alcohol soluble and washes away during normal processing. Any tips are appreciated!
Jared Ahrendsen, MD/PhD
jahrends@bidmc.harvard.edu

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