Primary neural leprosy: clinical, neurophysiological and pathological presentation and progression.

Disability in leprosy is a direct consequence of damage to the peripheral nervous system which is usually worse in patients with no skin manifestations, an underdiagnosed subtype of leprosy known as primary neural leprosy. We evaluated clinical, neurophysiological and laboratory findings of 164 patients with definite and probable primary neural leprosy diagnoses. To better understand the disease progression and to improve primary neural leprosy clinical recognition we compared the characteristics of patients with short (≤12 months) and long (>12 months) disease duration.