A monoclonal antibody to I-A gene products of the immune response gene complex attenuates both humoral and cellular responses to acetylcholine receptor and appears to suppress clinical manifestations of experimental autoimmune myasthenia gravis. This demonstrates that use of antibodies against immune response gene products that are associated with susceptibility to disease may be feasible for t...

BACKGROUND The most sensitive diagnostic criterion of myasthenia gravis is a decrement in the muscular response to repetitive stimulation. The authors hypothesized that myasthenia gravis patients who show a train-of-four ratio (T4/T1) < 0.9 in the preanesthetic period will have increased sensitivity to nondepolarizing neuromuscular blocking agents compared with myasthenia gravis patients with p...

Patients with myasthenia gravis show sensitivity to non-depolarizing neuromuscular blocking drugs, but little is known about differences in this sensitivity between types of myasthenia. In 10 patients with ocular myasthenia gravis and 10 with generalized myasthenia gravis, twitch tension was monitored in the adductor pollicis muscle by supramaximal train-of-four stimulation of the ulnar nerve d...

Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disorder of the neuromuscular junction manifested as fatigable muscle weakness, which is typically caused by pathogenic autoantibodies against postsynaptic CHRN/AChR (cholinergic receptor nicotinic) in the endplate of skeletal muscle. Our previous studies have identified CA3 (carbonic anhydrase 3) as a specific protein insufficient in skeletal muscle from myas...

Ocular myasthenia in Graves’ disease is very rare with less than 10 cases reported. We present a clinically euthyroid lady with features of thyroid associated opthalmopathy (TAO) who had mild ptosis, external opthalmoplegia, firm goiter and subclinical hyperthyroidism. Hertel exopthalmometry confirmed exopthalmos. CT orbit revealed thickening of bilateral inferior, medial and superior recti. An...

Myasthenia gravis is a paralytic disorder with autoantibodies against acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction. A proportion of patients instead has antibodies against muscle-specific kinase, a protein essential for acetylcholine receptor clustering. These are generally of the immunoglobulin-G4 subclass and correlate with disease severity, suggesting specific myasthenogenic activit...

Mice from eight inbred strains were immunized with acetylcholine receptor (AChR) purified from Torpedo californica. All mice developed high concentrations of serum antibodies (10(-6) M) against the immunogen and approximately 80% possessed antibodies reactive with mouse nicotinic AChR. 33% of the mice immunized (n = 236) developed muscular weakness and flaccid paralysis. Behavioral, electrophys...

BACKGROUND Thymectomy has been a mainstay in the treatment of myasthenia gravis, but there is no conclusive evidence of its benefit. We conducted a multicenter, randomized trial comparing thymectomy plus prednisone with prednisone alone. METHODS We compared extended transsternal thymectomy plus alternate-day prednisone with alternate-day prednisone alone. Patients 18 to 65 years of age who ha...

hla-drb1 allele frequencies of 28 myasthenia gravis (mg) patients, residents of southern iranian provinces, were studied using pcr-ssp method. the control group consisted of 100 healthy individuals of the same ethnic group. the allele hla-drb1 * 16 (rr= 2.04, p= 0.028) was found to be significantly increased in mg patients compared to the control group, whereas hladrb1 * 15(rr= 0.17 p= 0.043) a...

facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (fshd) is a common inherited muscular dystrophy presented clinically with slowly progressive weakness and wasting of facial and limb muscles and rare bulbar muscle involvement. we present herein a 70-year-old man who was a known case of fshd with complaint of 15-day history of progressive difficulty in chewing and dysarthria and was found to have myastheni...