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Case Reports
. 2022 Jun 11;22(1):217.
doi: 10.1186/s12883-022-02733-y.

Gardnerella vaginalis purulent meningitis in an adolescent male: a case report

Hongji Lu #  1 , Yaming Du #  1 , Tao Pan  1 , Zheng Lou  2 , Huiping Li  1 , Yingdi Liao  1 , Lixin Wang  3
Affiliations
Case Reports

Gardnerella vaginalis purulent meningitis in an adolescent male: a case report

Hongji Lu et al. BMC Neurol. .

Abstract

Background: We report a rare case of Gardnerella vaginalis found in the cerebrospinal fluid of a young boy.

Case presentation: A 14-year-old boy was admitted to hospital with headache, vomiting, fever, drowsiness and positive meningeal irritation signs on examination. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) shows white blood cell and protein were elevated, and glucose was low. Traditional aerobic and anaerobic culture of CSF did not grow any organisms. However, metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) reveals G. vaginalis in his CSF. The patient was diagnosed with purulent meningitis, and treated with intravenous meropenem and linezolid for a week, followed by oral administration of amoxicillin for two weeks. He recovered without sequelae.

Conclusions: Purulent meningitis caused by Gardnerella vaginalis is extremely rare. Metagenomic next-generation sequencing of CSF should be highlighted for early diagnosis. With effective antibiotic treatment, the prognosis was excellent.

Keywords: A case report; Cerebrospinal fluid; Gardnerella vaginalis; Meningitis; Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS).

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The coverage and abundance of Gardnerella vaginalis in the mNGS results. a the mNGS results had covered 0.9471% of the whole genome of G. vaginalis, with each bar representing the reads number aligned to a 10kbp region of the genome. b the 406 reads aligned to G. vaginalis genome occupied about 16% of the total 2434 reads for microbes
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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