Kluver-Bucy Syndrome

Excerpt

Kluver-Bucy syndrome (KBS) is a neuropsychiatric disorder due to lesions affecting bilateral temporal lobes, especially the hippocampus and amygdala.

Clinical Features

1. Hyperorality (A tendency or compulsion to examine objects by mouth)

2. Hypermetamorphosis (Excessive attentiveness to visual stimuli with a tendency to touch every such stimulus regardless of its history or reward value)

3. Hypersexuality

4. Bulimia

5. Placidity

6. Visual agnosia and

7. Amnesia.

Patients having a combination of three or more different elements listed above are described as having partial KBS.

The clinical features of KBS were initially reported by Sanger Brown and Edward Albert Sharpey-Schäfer, two British experimental neurologists, in 1888. They described the behavioral transformations after the removal of bilateral temporal lobes in monkeys. But the complete syndrome was described later by Heinrich Kluver (neuropsychologist) and Paul Clancy Bucy (neurosurgeon) in 1939, unaware of the previous reporting. They described the behavioral syndrome which occurred in a Rhesus monkey (named Aurora) three weeks after bilateral temporal lobectomy. The first description of KBS in humans came from Dr. Hrayr Terzian (1925-1988) and Dr. Giuseppe Ore in 1955 in a 19-year-old man who underwent bilateral temporal lobectomy for seizures. The first identified and reported case of KBS was in a 22-year-old male patient with bilateral temporal damage due to herpes simplex meningoencephalitis by Marlowe et al.