DOI: 10.36347/sjmcr.2023.v11i04.083

Pages: 751-753

Infective endocarditis is responsible of high intra-hospital morbidity and mortality rates. This can be explained partially by the diversity of its complications, which are often difficult to diagnose and manage therapeutically. We report the case of a 63-year-old woman, admitted to the intensive care unit for a sepsis due to infective endocarditis. On her second day of admission, she presented rapidly worsening paraparesis that leaded to flaccid paraplegia, for which she underwent a spinal MRI showing an extensive epidural abscess from T8 to T12 with spinal cord compression. The patient benefited from an emergency laminectomy, and the intraoperative bacteriological sample found the same germ isolated in the blood cultures (staphylococcus aureus methicillin sensitive). This case report emphasizes the importance of clinical and paraclinical evaluation of patients with infective endocarditis, in order to detect complications as early as possible, because if unnoticed, their management become very delicate.