Saturday 20 October 2012

CLIPPERS And Other Nasties

Station Cat - seen on the way to work occasionally
News about CLIPPERS is a bit thin on the ground at the moment. Hopefully, like the retail industry, the journals are saving everything up for the Christmas rush. In the mean-time, I was flicking through a paper called "Autoinflammatory grey matter lesions in humans: cortical encephalitis, clinical disorders, experimental models" (unfortunately not open access but you can read the abstract). Hidden away was a brief mention of CLIPPERS, essentially commenting that it is a new example of a disease which has a " ... unspecific inflammatory reaction which may also affect grey matter". This much we know, but it is interesting that there are now attempts in the literature to compare and contrast CLIPPERS to other diseases - much of this paper was about Multiple Sclerosis which was a candidate diagnosis in my case, at least for a week or so. In fact this paper approached things from a mechanistic rather than a disease perspective - it considered a particular way in which damage to the brain could occur and then discussed the various different disorders which could cause it.

The other thing which I found both interesting and worrying last year, was the sheer number of different things which can afflict us. When I was in hospital the doctors would tell me they were going to test for all sorts of things which I had never even heard of. Mostly I didn't even know whether to worry about the diagnosis if I got one. If I'd known about all these different maladies before I was investigated I'm sure I would have got really stressed out trying to work out which it could be. As it turned out, with CLIPPERS I didn't know whether to worry about the diagnosis and I'm not sure the doctors did either!

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.

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