Acute loss of psychic self-activation after cardiac arrest and delayed bilateral pallidal lesions on brain MRI.

The delay between cardiac arrest and brain MRI is usually extremely different in the few cerebral imaging studies assessing the affected brain areas. We report an unusual case of loss of psychic self-activation appeared immediately after a cardiac arrest in a middle age patient. The first brain MRI, one month after the vascular event, did not show the classical lesions typically reported, such as lesion of the caudate nucleus or the globus pallidus. Two years later, although the cognitive performances of our patient were improved, a second brain MRI demonstrated bilateral pallidal lesions, suggesting a possible mechanism with delayed hypoxic lesions.