Reversible Hypercalcemic Cerebral Vasoconstriction with Seizures and Blindness: A Paradigm for Eclampsia?

Abstract

Although hypercalcemia may cause drowsiness, lethargy, weakness, confusion and coma it rarely causes seizures or cerebral infarction. The patient presented had a clinical evolution from hallucinosis to a generalized tonic-clonic seizure, and subsequent cortical blindness with occipital cerebral ischemia as evidenced by SPECT and MRI scans. EEG revealed occipital PLEDs. With reversal of hypercalcemia, there was a return of vision, resolution of EEG epileptiform activity, although with some residual occipital infarction. This case, in concert with a literature review of hypercalcemia, reveals examples of occipital and watershed ischemia, blindness, seizures and hypertension, a pattern markedly similar to that of eclampsia. Furthermore, medications such as magnesium sulfate, believed to reverse cerebrovasospasm responsible for the eclamptic neurologic findings, may counter the effects of hypercalcemia at a cellular level, lending support to a calcium-mediated injury in eclampsia.