WHILE HER COLLEAGUES ARE COUNTING DOWN THE DAYS, Rebecca Alves is one kindergarten teacher dreading the end of the school year. She suffers from a rare autoimmune disorder called Devic’s disease and has been told by her insurer that on July 1 it will stop paying for the $12,000-a-month infusions she’s been taking for seven years.
Step by step on a long road to recovery After more than five months in the hospital being treated for a rare disease, Caroline Hinckley, left, is home with her family, including her mother Kristie, and on the mend. (Troy R. Bennett / The Times Record) Brunswick teenager battles back from debilitating Devic’s Disease By Darcie Moore, Times Record Staff Published: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 2:18 PM EDT BRUNSWICK — Approximately eight months have passed since the symptoms of a rare autoimmune disease landed Caroline Hinckley, now 17, in the emergency room at Maine Medical Center in Portland and down a long road to diagnoses, treatment and painful baby steps toward recovery.
Neuromyelitis optica (NMO or Devic’s syndrome) is a rare autoimmune disease, previously considered a multiple sclerosis variant. The most important laboratory and clinical features are optic myelitis and transverse myelitis, associated with neuromyelitis optica-IgG antibody (NMO-IgG) positivity. Subsequent to this immunological test being available, different groups have described the not-so-rare comorbidity of neuromyelitis optica with other systemic autoimmune diseases, systemic lupus erythematosus with secondary anti-phospholipid syndrome (APS) in particular.
We report on a patient suffering from symptomatic spinal attacks in the form of a paroxysmal “positive” (algetic-tonic) Brown-S?quard syndrome. A cervical cord lesion, presumably inflammatory-demyelinating in origin, was identified as the morphological correlate of these attacks.