Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis: More Evidence Suggesting a Link
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17161/rrnmf.v2i3.15146Keywords:
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, central nervous system, gene, autoimmune disease, case reportAbstract
Objectives Previous reports of the concurrence of multiple sclerosis (MS) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in the same patients suggest shared pathogenesis, with the C9orf72 mutation as a possible shared genetic link.
Methods: Symptoms, neuroimaging, and laboratory data were summarized for patients with ALS and MS within our ALS registry. Using age adjusted MS prevalence rates, we calculated the expected co-occurrence using the binomial test.
Results: Clinical and demographic features of the five patients (four female, one male) with ALS and MS are described. Because ALS more frequently occurs in men, observing 4/5 female patients with concurrent ALS/MS showed a borderline expectation difference (P=0.073). The observed co-occurrence of ALS and MS was 5X times higher than the expected frequency of 0.98 (P <0.004). Four patients were found negative for C9orf72.
Discussion: Our results suggest a non-random association between MS and ALS, although shared genetic etiology was not found.
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Copyright (c) 2021 Kristyn Pocock MD, Idil Baysal BA MSN RN, James Scanlan PhD, Michael Elliott MD, Angeli Mayadev MD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
