Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, found treatment with angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors reversed heart-muscle dysfunction in 12 of 19 boys with DMD or BMD, had no effect on four, and didn’t have a sustained effect in three. The investigators said more data are required before they can make definitive recommendations about ACE inhibitors in these diseases and that cardiac magnetic resonance images (MRIs) might be better than echocardio-grams in assessing DMD- and BMD-related heart dysfunction. AAN

 

The presence of immune-system proteins (antibodies) formed against a cell protein called SOX1 is correlated with the presence of lung cancer in patients with Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome (LEMS), according to a multinational study.

LEMS, which involves debilitating weakness, results from a mistaken immune-system attack on calcium channels on the ends of nerve fibers. These calcium channels are needed for transmission of chemical signals from nerve to muscle fibers, and immune-system antibodies destroy them.

Doctors have long known that people with LEMS also have lung cancer about 40 percent to 60 percent of the time, and it’s known that the inadvertent attack on nerve-fiber calcium channels is an unfortunate “side effect” of the immune system’s attack on similar calcium channels on the surface of lung-cancer cells.

Now, Francesc Graus at the University of Barcelona (Spain) and colleagues, who published their findings March 18 in Neurology, have identified SOX1, a protein found inside lung-cancer tumor cells, as another target of the immune system as it tries to fight the tumor. (Antibodies against SOX1 don’t affect the nerve or muscle fibers.)

When Graus and colleagues studied 55 people with LEMS and a type of lung cancer called small-cell lung carcinoma, and 50 with LEMS alone, they found SOX1 antibodies in the blood of 35 ( 64 percent) of those with both

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conditions and in none of those with LEMS alone.

The investigators conclude that detection of SOX1 antibodies may become a useful tool in early detection of lung cancer in patients with LEMS.

Four research groups reported improvement of treatment-resistant myasthenia gravis (MG) with the drug rituximab.

A group based in Barcelona, Spain, reported a dramatic improvement with rituximab in six patients with MG who had not responded to other medications. AAN.

When a group that included Rup Tandan, director of the MDA clinic at the Fletcher Allen Health Care Center in Burlington, Vt., tested rituximab in six female patients, all of whom had not responded well to other treatments, they found a trend toward improvement in muscle strength scores after rituximab treatment and “significant and continuous” improvement in scores on a scale measuring activities of daily living. AAN

A group that included Alan Pestronk, MDA clinic director at Washington University in St. Louis, reported using rituximab to successfully treat two patients with MG who had not responded to other forms of therapy. AAN

A French research team reported following five patients with MG who had not responded to other treatments. After two years of treatment with rituximab, all patients had stopped corticosteroid medications and reduced their dose of cholinesterase inhibitor medications (two common treatments for MG). AAN

 

An Israeli group reported that type 1A Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT1A), which results from a mutation on chromosome 17 that causes an excess of the PMP22 protein, appears to worsen as it’s passed from parent to

child. In 21 out of 23 parent-child pairs, and in 14 out of 16 families studied, there was an earlier age of symptom onset in the children than in their parents, and the average severity in the younger generation was slightly higher than in the parental generation. The researchers said they don’t know what the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon might be. AAN

A trial of valproic acid and carnitine in 36 infants with type 1 spinal muscular atrophy (SMA1) who are 2 weeks to 9 months old opened in April at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, with additional sites in Baltimore; Detroit; Columbus, Ohio; Madison, Wisc.; Montreal; and Cologne, Germany. Valproic acid may increase production of the needed SMN protein in children with SMA, and carnitine has been added because valproic acid depletes it in the body. The study will last about a year. See www.projectcuresma.org; or contact Sandra Reyna at (801) 581-3551 or sandra.reyna@genetics.utah.edu.

An MDA-supported clinical trial of lithium carbonate, a medication commonly used to treat bipolar disorder, is set to begin in people with ALS following reports the drug may dramatically slow the progress of this disease. The study will involve 10 sites throughout the United States. Principal investigator is neurologist Robert Miller, director of the Forbes Norris MDA/ALS Research Center at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. The study is an effort to confirm or refute the findings of a recent Italian trial of lithium carbonate in ALS conducted at the University of Pisa and other institutions. For more information: www.mda.org/research/view_ctrial. aspx?id=219