View clinical trials related to Neuromuscular Diseases.
Filter by:The conventional hypoxic challenge test might not predict 'fitness-to-fly' equally well in all patients. Patients at risk of hypercapnia with supplemental oxygen are not well studied. Th investigators will study children who have either neuromuscular weakness or central hypoventilation and who require nocturnal or intermittent daytime ventilator support. The study also aims to assess feasibility of a randomised controlled trial (RCT) comparing the standard hypoxic standard test to a modified test designed to better suit children with type two respiratory failure.
Patients with motor neurone disease (MND) typically experience relentless motor decline and die within three years of symptom onset from respiratory muscle weakness. There are currently no effective therapies and the discovery of novel therapies is hampered by the lack of a sensitive disease biomarker. Consequently, there is a huge drive to discover novel biomarkers, which can reliably track disease progression over time. These can then be incorporated into clinical drug trials to expedite effective drug discovery. Muscle fasciculations represent the hyperexcitability of diseased motor neurons and are almost universally present from the early stages of MND. The investigators predict that the site, frequency and shape of fasciculations might provide a sensitive measure of disease progression in an individual. In order to calibrate this technique, the investigators will conduct a 12-month longitudinal study, recruiting 24 patients from the King's College Hospital Motor Nerve Clinic, comprising a mixture of patients with MND and those with benign fasciculation syndrome. Patients in this latter group have fasciculations but do not develop weakness and have normal lifespans. They are therefore an optimal control group. At each visit, the investigators will take resting HDSEMG recordings from all four limbs and perform standard clinical measures of disease progression. The investigators will also monitor the decline in motor unit number using a newly validated neurophysiological technique, called Motor Unit Number Index (MUNIX).
This project seeks to investigate the effects of a single acute intermittent hypoxia (AIH) session on respiratory and non-respiratory motor function and EMG (electromyography) activity on patients with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and healthy controls.
The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of gaze-directed oculomotor training incorporated with web-based curriculum readings in Chinese to enhancing fixation, saccade and Chinese characters recognition in schoolchildren with neuromuscular disease associated with congenital oculomotor anomalies.
Pneumonia, respiratory exacerbations, and chronic pulmonary infection are important causes of emergency admissions, hospitalisations and death in children with Neuromuscular disorders and Cerebral Palsy. Hence, there is a need for research on how to therapeutically aid airway clearance and decrease respiratory exacerbations. Studies have shown that nebulised Hypertonic Saline is well tolerated, reduces pulmonary exacerbations and improves lung function and Lung Clearance Index in patients with Cystic Fibrosis, and enhances mucociliary clearance in asthmatic patients. Nevertheless, to the investigators' knowledge, there is no available data concerning the use of nebulised Hypertonic Saline in the management of children with Neuromuscular disorders and Cerebral Palsy. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of nebulised Hypertonic Saline to decrease hospitalisations and courses of antibiotics in children with Neuromuscular disorders and Cerebral Palsy.
Patients suffering chronic hypercapnic respiratory insufficiency (e.g. in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, obesity hypoventilation syndrome) benefit from home mechanical ventilation. These patients are complex; and the ventilator´s parameters should be set-up according to the underlying disease and particular patient's characteristics. The non-invasive ventilation therapy is mostly titrated while the patient is awake, hence Problems, such as Patient-Ventilator asynchrony, arising while sleeping on the ventilator therapy would remain undetected. Sleep studies, such as polysomnography or polygraphy and transcutaneous carbon dioxide monitoring could be valuable tools to fine-tune the ventilator's settings. This could foster the ventilator´s effectivity and patient satisfaction, thus therapy's adherence. Nevertheless the sleep studies are expensive, time-consuming and not widely available. The aim of this study is to learn the findings of sleep studies when they are performed on stable patients on home mechanical ventilation as part of their routine check-ups. In this context, it will be assessed whether the sleep studies' findings lead to a change (adjustment) of the ventilator´s therapy. Moreover, this study aims to investigate whether the absence of sleep studies would result in missing important events that require an adjustment of therapy. The results of this study could provide information that lead to a more standardized protocol of follow-up checks of patients on home mechanical ventilation in a cost-effective manner.
Preliminary data underline the fact that muscular deoxygenation during training happens earlier in adult patients suffering from neuromuscular disorders in comparison to controls. Up to date, pediatric data are lacking. The study aims at demonstrating if a correlation exists between the motor deficiency and the muscular deoxygenation in children suffering from neuromuscular disorders.
Motor Function Measure (MFM) is a validated tool assessing the motor function of neuromuscular patients constituted of 32 items. Despite standardized Motor Function Measure (MFM) training sessions, there is still an inter-individual variability in the items' scoring procedure, depending for example on the subjectivity of the therapist. Among the 32 items of the MFM, 3 currently require the use of a paper, and could be automated by using a digital tablet. It is the item 18 where the patient traces the edge of a Compact Disc, item 19 requiring to draw loops inside a frame and item 22 requiring to place a finger on each standardized cases. The reproducibility of these 3 items could be improved with the use of a digital tablet and the development of a software allowing to computerize the scoring procedure. The second interest is to implement directly the MFM data in the MFM base. The hypothesis is that the difference of scoring of these 3 items between digital tablet versus paper completion is enough low to use indifferently each completion in patients with a neuromuscular disease.
Nocturnal Non Invasive Ventilation (NIV) is the reference treatment for chronic alveolar hypoventilation in patients with neuro-muscular diseases. NIV can be provided by using different types of interfaces: Nasal masks are the most frequent type of interface used at home but oronasal masks are used by at least 25% of neuro-muscular patients mainly because of persistent unintentional mouth leaks. However, oronasal mask may cause persistent upper airway obstructive respiratory events because of the mechanical constraint on the chin induced by the traction of the straps that may push the mandible posteriorly during sleep. No randomized study has specifically addressed the question of the impact of type of interface in patients with neuromuscular diseases treated by nocturnal NIV. The investigators hypothesize that: 1. the application of oronasal mask may jeopardize the pharyngeal patency in patients already proned to upper airway obstruction; 2. the use of a nasal mask may improve upper airway stability and NIV efficacy while reducing side effects. Authors objective will be to compare the impact of nasal mask versus oronasal mask on NIV efficacy and side-effects. Eligible patients are those with nocturnal NIV and neuromuscular disease. After a scheduled hospital visit, patients willing to participate will undergo in random order 2 unattended nocturnal polygraphies under NIV at home: one polygraphy with nasal mask; one with an oronasal mask. Each polygraphy ans side effects assessment will be performed after one week of familiarization with each mask.
This study aims to describe the evolution of pulmonary function in 3 neuromuscular diseases : Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Werdnig-Hoffinann disease, congenital myopathy, monitored in Besançon university hospital.