Remote surface EMG in MND
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Home monitoring in motor neuron disease using remote surface electromyography: a feasibility study
IRAS ID
248956
Contact name
Chris Shaw
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 3 months, 30 days
Research summary
Patients with motor neurone disease typically experience relentless motor decline and die within three years of symptom onset from respiratory muscle weakness. There are currently no effective therapies and the discovery of novel therapies is hampered by the lack of a sensitive disease biomarker. Consequently, there is a huge drive to discover novel biomarkers, which can reliably track disease progression over time. These can then be incorporated into clinical drug trials to expedite effective drug discovery.
Muscle fasciculations represent the hyperexcitability of diseased motor neurons and are almost universally present from the early stages of MND. We predict that the site, frequency and shape of fasciculations might provide a sensitive measure of disease progression in an individual.
We have been conducting a 12-month longitudinal study of 25 patients, performing high-density surface EMG every two months. We have validated an automated technique to process these large data sets (Bashford et al 2019). Due to a significant dropout rate (9/25) in the study owing to patients' inability to travel to and from the hospital for each assessment, we wish to introduce remote home monitoring in the long run. This would enable us to capture key data at a point when patients are becoming too disabled to attend the hospital.
Our current recording equipment is expensive and bulky, lacking the portability for widespread use in patients' homes. In collaboration with bioengineers at Imperial College London, we have built and customised a more compact device called PANACEA. This is under a tenth of the cost of our current device and is no larger than an average broadband router. The aim of this study is to test the feasibility of this device, comparing it with our current equipment to ensure its safety, practicability and efficacy at recording fasciculations.
REC name
London - Harrow Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/LO/0085
Date of REC Opinion
16 Apr 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion