Bilateral basal ganglia and unilateral cortical involvement in a diabetic uremic patient.

We report a 57-year-old woman with uremic encephalopathy who presented with dysarthria, dysphagia, hypophonia, and drowsiness. The patient's radiologic findings were rather unusual in that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed abnormal findings involving the basal ganglia bilaterally and frontal cortex unilaterally. After intensified hemodialysis, her symptoms and follow-up brain MRI showed marked improvement. We postulated that the underlying mechanism of uremic encephalopathy based on diffusion-weighted imaging and apparent diffusion coefficient maps.