Friday 23 March 2012

Symptoms update - beer

Here's one from the 'not sure' category.

I went to the pub one evening this week with a friend for a couple of beers and a chat. That was good, but I think I noticed that I was finding it marginally more difficult to walk  home than on the way there. Certainly I managed to trip up on a perfectly flat surface just outside the pub, but I think I felt that I needed more muscle effort to make my legs walk. I've also been quite tired too this week.

This made me think that my post back in November where I talked about emotional effects might have had an alcohol effect too - after all I had had "a couple" of drinks that night too.

I'm going to have to pay attention to these three factors: alcohol, emotions and tiredness to see if I can decide if one plays a stronger influence than the others.

Booze barometer - this week was a genuine couple - I had 3 pints. In November I had had considerably more than this.

Sunday 11 March 2012

Another Name - Jean-Martin Charcot

One of my objectives is to generate a list of current researchers working with HSP, and I suspect that is going to take a while to do. I've a few starting points, and a vague approach in my mind, but I'm going to need to concentrate so I try not to miss any avenues.

In the mean time my brain was turning to the discovery of the condition, and I remember reading on the SP Foundation website: http://www.sp-foundation.org/hsp.html the reference to another name - a Frenchman called Charcot, with another alternative name for the condition: hereditary charcot disease. This post seeks more info - I Hadn't picked up Charcot before.

More info doesn't seem to be easy to find. I suspect that Charcot would be Jean-Martin Charcot, who was French and lived 1825-1893, so would have been around at the time of Strumpells 1880 paper but not Lorrains 1898 paper. Also in his favour was that he was a neurologist. Charcot is much better known for work in MS and Parkinsons, and for his approach to neurological examination. You can read more at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Charcot. These higher profile conditions, and CMT tend to flood the search results.

Another supporting observation is that Pierre Marie was a student of Charcot, who also worked with Adolph Strumpell - leading to Marie–Strümpell disease.


It would be nice to find references to Charcots work, which would be from the last three years of his life. If anyone has details, I would be pleased to receive.