There have been a few reported cases of CLIPPERS now and I wondered if there was any pattern. There's not enough cases or consistency of reported information to go into much detail but I thought it worth a look.
So simple things first, there's been an even split in the cases reported to date of 8 men and 9 women. Including me and the one female and one other male CLIPPERS patient I've heard about so far makes for 10 men and 10 women. On the limited information available it doesn't seem that men are any more or less likely to be diagnosed with CLIPPERS than women.
The histogram shows the number of reported cases for each age bracket. For instance from age 50 to 59 there have been 3 reported cases. Again the lack of cases means that limited conclusions can be drawn but it is tempting to see a weak age dependency in the plot - you're slightly more likely to be diagnosed when older than 50. The drop in cases over 80 could be interpreted as people dying of other age-related illnesses first or that CLIPPERS is more easily confused with other age-related conditions.
Finally I looked at the most common reported symptoms at first evaluation.
The histogram shows the number of patients reported as suffering from the specified symptoms at first evaluation - most patients have more than one of these. Ataxia and diplopia are the most common. I had diplopia first before developing ataxia and parethesia subsequently. Facial paresthesia is the most common presenting type of paresthesia. I started with diplopia and then ataxia with finger/hand paresthesia as well as facial - felt like I was wearing a plastic mask at times.
Hopefully we'll see some more studies in 2012 which will reveal more about the general pattern of CLIPPERS.
Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
