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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A new surgical technique for thymectomy is presented. Three hundred and seventeen patients with myasthenia gravis and 20 with thymomas who had myasthenic symptoms were operated on. The new surgical approach--a small transverse sternotomy--was used in 257 cases (in 240 patients with myasthenia gravis and 17 with thymomas) and conventional median sternotomy in 80. In myasthenic patients small tra...

Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease that is characterised by muscle weakness and fatigue, is B-cell mediated, and is associated with antibodies directed against the acetylcholine receptor, muscle-specific kinase (MUSK), lipoprotein-related protein 4 (LRP4), or agrin in the postsynaptic membrane at the neuromuscular junction. Patients with myasthenia gravis should be classified into subgr...

Purpose: We conducted this study to retrospectively analyze the clinical effects of surgical resection for patients with myasthenia gravis (MG) complicated with thymoma. Methods: 162 patients with myasthenia gravis complicated with thymoma, that were admitted to our hospital and underwent surgical disease resection from Nov. 1993 to Nov. 2015, were selected for this study. Analyzed were the pat...

Myasthenia gravis and myotonic dystrophy do not usually coexist; however, we present a rare case where both conditions coexisted. Herein, we describe a 34-year-old woman who presented with symptoms of myasthenia gravis with coexisting myotonic dystrophy. She complained of limb weakness, difficulty in chewing and swallowing, and ptosis. She also had myotonia. The patient’s brother also had simil...