Evaluation of the jitter phenomenon in myasthenic patients and their relatives

✍ Scribed by Eero Hokkanen; Barbara Emeryk-Szajewska; Katarzyna Rowińska-Marcińska

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1978
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 614 KB
• Volume: 219
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0340-5354
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00313370

✦ Synopsis

Single fiber electromyography with jitter measurements and blocking evaluation was used for investigating 23 myasthenic patients, their 29 healthy relatives, coming from 10 families, and a control group of 10 subjects. Blocking was never seen in the healthy controls, and the jitter averaged some 30 microsec. Blocking was present in the myasthenic patients in 25.4% of the recorded potential pairs and there was a pathological jitter, which often extended over a few hundred microsec. The records of ten healthy relatives of patients were suggestive of slight but unquestionable abnormalities of neuromuscular transmission, viz. blocking and a jitter of over 60 microsec or more. The results demonstrate subclinical derangements of neuromuscular transmission in families of myasthenic patients, which points to a familial factor as involved in the pathomechanism of the disease.