Richard Ac Hughes

..Corticosteroids, intravenous immunoglobulin and plasma exchange each provide short term benefit but the possible long-term benefits of immunosuppressive drugs have yet to be confirmed in randomised, controlled trials...

..Further research is needed to discover treatments to prevent 20% of patients from being left with persistent and significant disability...

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..Our goal was to determine whether immunization is associated with the incidence of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS)...

..Since approximately 20% of patients die or have persistent disability despite immunotherapy, more research is needed to identify better treatment regimens and new therapeutic strategies...

..We aimed to establish whether 10% caprylate-chromatography purified immune globulin intravenous (IGIV-C) has short-term and long-term benefit in patients with CIDP...

..The Peripheral Nerve Society has formed a standing committee, the Inflammatory Neuropathy Consortium (http://pns.ucsd.edu/INC.htm), to facilitate the trials needed to answer the remaining questions in the inflammatory neuropathies...

..011). On the basis of available data, IVIg can be recommended as a first-line treatment option for GBS and CIDP. For MMN, although the evidence for IVIg is limited, there is no evidence to recommend other treatments...

..Adverse events were mostly mild and serious adverse events were not more common with IVIg than with placebo. The results persuaded the US FDA and Health Canada to approve Gamunex for use in CIDP...

..More research is needed to identify optimal methods for all aspects of supportive care...

..These conclusions should be reviewed when the full results of all four trials have been published...

..A logistic regression analysis identified environmental toxin exposure and hypertriglyceridaemia, but not glucose intolerance or alcohol overuse as significant risk factors that deserve further investigation as possible causes of CIAP...

..General measures to rehabilitate patients and manage symptoms, including foot drop, weak hands, fatigue and pain, are important...

..It is probably due to an autoimmune process. Immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory drugs would be expected to be beneficial...

..According to low quality evidence oral corticosteroids delay recovery. Diabetes requiring insulin was significantly more and hypertension less common with corticosteroids...

..The impact of later side-effects of prednisolone on long-term costs and quality of life are likely to reduce the cost per QALY of IVIg treatment...

..Other Cochrane systematic reviews have shown that plasma exchange (PE) significantly hastens recovery in GBS compared with supportive treatment alone, and that corticosteroids alone are ineffective...

..Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is an acute paralysing disease caused by inflammation of the peripheral nerves, which corticosteroids would be expected to benefit...

..With the exception of a possibly protective effect indicated by bladder weight, this study suggests that BDNF may not provide an effective therapy for GBS, at least in the acute phase of the disease...

..We aimed to develop and validate a scoring system based on clinical characteristics in the acute phase of GBS to predict outcome at 6 months...

..Six CIDP and seven GBS patients' sera reacted with this band. These results support the view that antibodies to myelin proteins, and especially P0, are present in the serum of some patients with CIDP and GBS...

..8+/-4.6 nm). This reinforces the hypothesis that MAG is involved in the control of neurofilament spacing through sidearm phosphorylation and demonstrates a MAG-mediated pathogenic effect of the anti-MAG antibody in peripheral nerves...

..4%, 95% CI 1.1-1.8%, p=0.005. Since CD4+CD25+ cells include cells with special immunoregulatory functions, further investigation of this phenomenon and its relation to possible loss of regulatory T cell function in GBS is warranted...

..Results suggest that Fc gammaRIII genotypes may represent mild disease-modifying factors in GBS...