Impairments of Neuro-muscular Communication in Motor-Neuron Disease: A Bio-Marker for Early and Personalised Diagnosis

Motor neuron disease (MND) or ALS is a nervous system disease. ALS leads to a loss of movement ability that eventually leads to death. At the moment, there is no known treatment for ALS. Early diagnosis in individuals improves clinical care and facilitates timely entry into clinical trials. However, current methods for diagnosis are primarily clinical, and to date, no cost-effective biomarkers have been developed. Our objective is to identify a robust non-invasive neurophysiological-based system that can be used both as a biomarker of disease onset, and a measurement of progression using quantitative EEG and surface EMG (bipolar and high-density).The investigators postulate that analysing the joint recordings of EEG and EMG (bipolar or high-density) can give measures that better distinguish healthy people and ALS patient subgroups and that the findings can be developed as biomarkers of early diagnosis and disease progression.

Inclusion Criteria:Healthy Volunteers:age and gender-matched to patient groupsthe intact physical ability to take part in the experiment.Patients:Diagnosis of ALS, PLS, PMA, SMA, Polio or MScapable of providing informed consent.Exclusion Criteria:Healthy Controls:History of neuromuscularneurological or active psychiatric disease diseasehistory of reaction or allergy to recording environments, equipment and the recording gels.Patients:the presence of active psychiatric diseaseany medical condition associated with severe neuropathy (e.g. poorly controlled diabetes).History of reaction or allergy to recording environments, equipment and the recording gels.