MGA Annual Report 1998

(Project Funded by The National Lottery Charities Board)

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is often thought to be most common in young women, but MG can also be first recognised in middle-aged or elderly individuals. In fact, recent surveys in Denmark and the United Kingdom show that over 50% of new cases are over the age of 50; moreover, the overall prevalence appears to be rising with rates as high as 10-15/100,000 of the population as reported by Dr Neil Robertson (University of Cambridge) at the recent MGA National Meeting in Oxford. This apparent increase in incidence probably reflects improved recognition and diagnosis, and the increasing age of the population as a whole, although one cannot be entirely sure that there is not a true increase. These observations raise the question of how effectively myasthenia and other autoimmune neurological diseases are recognised in the elderly. In addition, because some of them are associated with cancers, would a screen for these antibodies lead to the earlier diagnosis and treatment of the tumours? For this reason the MGA applied to the National Lotteries Charities Board for funding to look at the incidence of a variety of autoantibodies to neurological antigens in elderly subjects.

The funding supports a research assistant, Mrs Linda Clover, and the costs of the research. Linda joined us last September from the Obstetrics Department at the John Radcliffe where she had worked for 20 years. She has wide experience of immunological techniques and is ideally suited to this project.

The first job was to obtain the 'elderly' sera. Prof Sir John Grimley Evans, the Professor of Clinical Geratology in Oxford, had already stored 1600 random samples from apparently healthy individuals over the age of 60, but Linda had to thaw each one and transfer an aliquot to new numbered tubes before she could start the project, and also to learn how to perform the different neurological assays. Each of the antibodies she measures is strongly associated with a particular disease, and some of them, particularly antibodies to voltage-gated calcium channels, Purkinje cell cytoplasm and neuronal nuclei, are found often or sometimes with certain types of cancer.

Linda's results so far suggest that antibodies to AChR must be very infrequent in 'healthy' elderly people, since we only have one positive result in 700 samples, whereas some of the other antibodies have been detected at low levels in up to 2% of the samples tested. By the end of the summer, Linda hopes to have completed the first 1600 samples, and will then test a similar number of sera from elderly patients who have been admitted to the John Radcliffe Hospital with non-neurological diagnoses. These results will not only give us new insights into the incidence of these rather special autoantibodies in elderly people, and the existence of previously undetected cancers, but also provide us with a unique series of control data for future studies. Finally, for comparison we may need to test sera from young healthy people - relatives be prepared!

Note: MGA gratefully acknowledges the two year grant made by the National Lottery Charities Board of almost £80,000, in support of this project.

	Notices	Search	Publications	What's New?	Myasthenia Gravis	Research	Top
	Organisation	Fundraising	Branches	Regions	Contacts	Newsletter	Home Page
		MGA Forum	Press & Publicity