PhD defence J. (Judith) Drenthen

Dissertation in short:

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a heterogeneous disorder regarding clinical manifestations, neurophysiology, treatment response and prognosis. This variability within GBS is only partly understood and may restrict accurate early diagnosis, subtyping, monitoring and prediction of outcome in individual patients with GBS. Currently, conventional nerve conduction studies (NCS) are used for confirming the diagnosis and to determine the subtype. However, several drawbacks of the conventional NCS ensure that there is a need for alternative and more sensitive methods.

In this thesis, studies are presented that aimed to determine if both standard and more advanced electrophysiological techniques can be used in the discrimination between subtypes in an early phase, to monitor the disease activity, to predict the clinical course and to define residual damage. The compound muscle action potential (CMAP) scan, an alternative neurophysiological method, is an important part of this thesis. In several studies the relation between changes of the CMAP scan and clinical parameters, such as disease course and subtype are investigated and discussed.