The clinical presentation to follow includes observations which have accumulated in my pediatric practice during the last eighteen months. The instances cited include many perplexing situations of a type one encounters in dealing with the problems of infancy and childhood.
The rather heterogeneous group of cases portray such symptoms as hypertonia, restlessness, excessive crying, retraction of the head, irregular respirations, bronchiospasm, pyloric spasm, enterospasm, convulsions and cyanotic spells occurring during infancy and often ascribed to status thymicolymphaticus or vagotonia. The cases illustrate that this syndrome may be manifested in the runabout period by continued hypertonia, sleeplessness, extreme restlessness, both mental and physical, and occasionally convulsions, occurring spontaneously or accompanying an acute illness, and in the older child by hypertonicity, together with other symptoms of increased neuromuscular irritability, emotional instability, incorrigibility and the syndrome of chorea. The frequency of emotional imbalance, excessive apprehensiveness, sleeplessness and tremor in the mothers of such