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Título

EPIDEMIOLOGICAL PROFILE OF 494 PATIENTS WITH NEUROMUSCULAR DISEASE IN A BRAZILIAN UNIVERSITY CENTER

Resumo

Background: It is of utmost importance to seek cross border collaboration and common ground to facilitate disease’s diagnosis and management. Nonetheless, little effort has been made regarding epidemiological profile of neuromuscular disorders.
Goal: This report analyses the epidemiological profile of 494 patients that presented for consultation in our university hospital, a tertiary care center for neuromuscular patients in Brazil.
Methods: Data was collected from April 2015 to April 2022. The patients were stratified according to topography – (1) nerve; (2) muscle; (3) motor neuron; (4) neuromuscular junction - and etiology.
Results: The most prevalent disorder was neuropathy (314 cases, 63,5%), followed by neuromuscular junction disorders (73 cases, 14,1%), myopathy (53 cases, 11,8%) and motor neuron disease (40 cases, 8%). Among patients with neuropathy, 276 (87,8%) cases were related to acquired etiologies and 38 (12,25%) to hereditary causes. In the subgroup of acquired neuropathies, major etiologies were inflammatory in 97 cases (35,2%), metabolic in 48 (15,3%), infectious in 35 (11,1%), toxic in 4 (1,1%) and there were 17 cases with more than one etiology hypothesized, 34 cases with other etiologies (nutritional, post-surgical, compressive or traumatic) and 39 (14,13%) cases with no etiology defined (currently under investigation).
Conclusion: The majority of neuromuscular disease in our cohort was represented by nerve disorders and the inflammatory etiology was the most frequent. Since this study is limited to only one center, and little effort in specialized literature has been made to set common referral patterns, selection bias and information bias may affect the interpretation of the data. Nonetheless, this study contributes for further analysis including topographic and etiological epidemiology of neuromuscular diseases and calls out for national as well as cross-border collaboration to proceed a standardized approach to neuromuscular diagnosis.