A Letter from Marguerite Hill

Hello MGA Members...I will be Consultant Senior Lecturer in Neurology at the Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. My research will be both clinical and laboratory-based.

Firstly I hope to develop an extensive database about myasthenia, asking what sort of people get myasthenia, how patients respond to treatment and whether the outcome differs in different age groups and in different types of MG.

The second part of the research ...will concentrate on T cells, the bad guys in myasthenia. I plan to follow the activity of different types of T cell through the course of the disease in individual patients. I hope this will provide valuable insight into how the current treatments work in some people and why they don't work in others.

For these ideas to become fact requires two important additional ingredients; money and willing volunteers ...and this is where you come in. The first study that I am hoping to do is questionnaire-based so you will all be invited to take part... more details will be available on this study in the next few months.

I will keep you posted about details of these studies via the MGA news. I hope to meet up with some of you soon.

Best wishes, Marguerite Hill.

(MGA News Editor's note - we have slightly paraphrased her very interesting letter due to space limitations)