Spontaneous Cerebrospinal Fluid Rhinorrhea in an Otherwise Healthy 42-Year-Old Female Presenting to a Resident Clinic

Rhinorrhea, a common symptom documented in patients presenting to primary care clinics, urgent care facilities, and emergency departments, is often attributed to viral, bacterial, or allergic causes when no other obvious etiology, such as a foreign body, is found. However, in the absence of other infectious signs or symptoms, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) rhinorrhea should be considered more prominently in a physician’s differential diagnosis than it often is. This process can be either traumatic or non-traumatic, so even in the absence of recent head trauma, it should be evaluated, as this also leaves the patient vulnerable to multiple life-threatening complications. In this report, we discuss one such patient who presented to multiple physicians with progressively worsening rhinorrhea, which was discovered to be due to a CSF leak through a defect in her cribriform plate and the treatment she received to resolve this issue once it was identified.