Wernicke syndrome

Wernicke syndrome is an ambiguous term. It may refer to:

• Wernicke aphasia: the eponymous term for receptive or sensory aphasia.

• Wernicke encephalopathy: an acute neurological syndrome of ophthalmoparesis, ataxia, and encephalopathy brought on by thiamine deficiency.

• Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, also called Korsakoff psychosis: a subacute dementia syndrome, often following Wernicke encephalopathy, characterized clinically by confabulation and clinicopathologically correlated with degeneration of the mammillary bodies.

See also

Carl Wernicke (1848-1905), the neurologist who described all of these syndromes.

Wernicke's area, named after Carl Wernicke, a brain region associated with the understanding of written and spoken language.