Active clinical trials for "Motor Neuron Disease"

The etiology of many neurodegenerative diseases is unknown. A few studies have suggested the role of infection in the gastrointestinal tract in the etiology and pathogenesis of neurological diseases such as idiopathic Parkinson. For example, infection with Helicobacter pylori has been suggested to play a role in Parkinson disease. In addition, bacterial pathogens such as spirochetes and bacterial products such as cyanobacterial toxins have been speculated as the contributing factors in the development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The effect of microbial composition of the gut in the pathogenesis of ALS is suspected. The difference in the bacterial profile of the gut has been documented in diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and obesity. The goal of this IRB protocol is to create a human tissue bank and to obtain patients' demographic information for future investigation of the role of bacterial pathogens and the role of gut flora composition in the development of neurodegenerative diseases including but not limited to ALS, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis.

The Expanded Access Program will provide access and assess the safety of AMX0035 for the treatment of people living with ALS.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease with a poor prognosis that occurs in adults 64 years on average. Its prevalence is 4 to 6/100 000 inhabitants. Swallowing disorders occur during evolution and involve the prognosis of patients in the short term by the association of dysphagia with severe malnutrition, and aspiration. The issue of phoniatric monitoring is to detect early onset of the swallowing disorders to develop strategies for respiratory protection, food adapted to disturbances, and speech therapy. The objective of this study is to compare the tongue force in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at the time of diagnosis and at the onset of swallowing disorders compared to healthy subjects, with the dynamic palatography device developed in the Laboratoire Parole et Langage (UMR 7309, CNRS-Université Aix-Marseille, Aix-en-Provence), which allows the measurement of the strength and duration of the pression of the tongue on the palate.

A disease called Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or ALS), which leads to difficulty swallowing, breathing, and movement, has been found to be higher for those serving in the military than in the general population. There are approximately 4,200 Veterans with ALS and roughly 1,000 new cases each year. When doctors attempt to determine the degree to which an ALS patient is suffering from the disease, they apply tests that are "graded" by experts. However, this approach to testing patients may not be very accurate. Researchers aim to use a system called DESIPHER to "listen" to ALS patients and find speech mistakes related to their condition. Researchers believe that, by detecting different types of errors, DESIPHER serves as a new kind of indicator of medical problems such as difficulty breathing or swallowing, without human "grading". This may also lead to a better system for automatically understanding ALS patients' speech.

This study aims to establish a biorepository and phenotyping database to investigate longitudinal changes in ALS subjects. Blood, including DNA and RNA, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and electrophysiologic measures will be collected every 6 months over 1 and a half years. The database and specimen repository will be made available to ALS researchers on a merit basis.

Introduction: Resting energy expenditure (REE) formulas for healthy people (HP) are used to calculate REE (cREE) in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients. In ALS an increase of measured REE (mREE) in indirect calometry (IC) compared to cREE is found in 50-60%. The aims were (i) to assess accuracy of cREE assessed using eleven formulas as compared to mREE and (ii) to create if needed a specific cREE formula for ALS patients. Method: ALS patients followed in the ALS expert center of Limoges between 1996 and 2014 and with a nutritional evaluation were included. mREE assessed with IC and cREE calculated with eleven predictive formulas (Harris Benedict (HB) 1919, HB 1984, WSchofield, De Lorenzo, Johnstone, Mifflin, WHO/FAO, Owen, Fleisch, Wang and Rosenbaum) were collected at time of diagnosis. Fat free mass (FFM) and fat mass (FM) were measured with impedancemetry. A Bland and Altman analysis was carried out. The percentage of accurate prediction ± 10%of mREE, and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were calculated. Using a derivation sample, a new REE formula was created using multiple linear regression according to sex, age, FFM and FM. Accuracy of this formula was assessed in a validation sample.

The diagnosis and the follow-up of the patients reached of SLA is centralized, since a few years, at the the Caribbean Reference center of the rare neurological diseases (CERCA labélisé in 2006) in Martinique and at the Unity of coverage of the neuromuscular Diseases, SLA and the rare neurological diseases (create in 2010) in Guadeloupe. Several phenotypic characteristics seemed to us to take out again data collected during the follow-up of the patients (26 in Guadeloupe, since the creation of the unity) in particular patients' high proportion of exceptionally long evolution (more than 10 years). Besides, we diagnosed several cases (10 cases in Guadeloupe since 2000) of association SLA- Parkinsonien Syndrome. This association, considered as exceptional could establish a particular phenotypic entity which we would like to describe. We are interested also originally geographical of the patients, with the hypothesis that he could exist in the Antilles one or several geographical isolates of the disease allowing to lead a étiologique investigation in search of a possible genetic or environmental cause.

The Dyspnea-ALS-Scale (DALS-15) is a uni-dimensional scale to measure dyspnea in patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. It can be easily and rapidly applied. The aim of this study is to investigate reliability and validity of Turkish version of the DALS-15.

The drug for this submission is Hope Biosciences' autologous, adipose-derived culture-expanded mesenchymal stem cells (HB-adMSCs) for the treatment of a single patient with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Stem cells have become a promising tool for the treatment of inflammatory and neurodegenerative conditions, including autoimmune diseases, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease.

This research program will focus on gait initiation and postural control in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients, by comparing patients with vs without postural instability (but also in comparison to controls), by using a multidisciplinary approach which combines neurophysiological and neuroimaging analyses. After clinical evaluation, two groups of ALS patients, defined upon the feature of postural instability, and one group of healthy subjects (n=25 for each group of patients and 20 for healthy subjects) will be included in the study. The neurophysiological evaluation will be performed through a gait initiation assessment, which will alow us to collect biomechanical and electromyographical data, such as the braking index. The neuroradiological evaluation will include first an fMRI analysis, a study of specific circuits in networks will be performed which will provide the first description of neural network dynamics associated with the preparation and execution of movement in ALS patients. The investigators major research hypothesis is: By comparing patients with vs without postural instability, but also in comparison to controls, the investigators main research neurophysiological hypothesis is that patients with postural instability will display an impaired braking. This impaired braking could be partly explained by a dysfunction and/or lesion of the basal ganglia and brain stem structures, corresponding to the investigators main neuroradiological hypothesis.