SullenSiren
Member
Hi everyone!!! I am now close to my 1st anniversary of pure benign twitches. Anyhow, more exciting is the news that I received from multiple neurologists at UCLA medical school. As everyone knows I am a med student at ucla. It appears BFS is quite common in the community and it also appears that all the neurologists are fully aware of BFS as a actual diagnosis. Actually, BFS is so benign that most researchers are not excited to do any research on it because it is not life threatening. Unfortunately, for us we dread this condition thinking it is more omnious, but knowingly it is benign and self-limited. Here are a few questions that I asked...1. Are twitches seen before any clinical weakness or atrophy? ALS is a disease of progressive weakness, normally twitches should not be seen before any atrophy or weakness. Often twitches is accompanied with weakness, but it is caused by deinnervation/reinervation of motor neurons. 2. What does that mean? it is caused by the dying muscles sending signals to motor neurons that have not died and to reinnervate and replace the dying motor neurons. However, twitches are experienced by everyone and if you asked any ALS patient whether they experienced twitches before having any weakness or noticeable atrophy, every patient should be able to say with certainly that they did notice twitches. Meaning that everyone has twitches, yet the pathology behind it is different. If someone turns out to have twitches and suspect ALS, then the noticeable weakness will be evident or weakness should be accompanied with 2-3 months. Most of the time weakness and atrophy is the main complaint when patients come in to be examined. A professor gave an example of brain tumor: someone who happens to have an incidental brain tumor will mentioned with great certainty that he/she experienced headaches prior to the diagnosis, yet it was found in a study that a majority of patients with small brain tumors was not the cause of their headaches. In fact, headaches are not caused by tumors unless they are large enough to cause meningeal irritation by herniation, bleeding or space occupation. 3. Are most twitches benign? Yes and are not a major complaint for most people. Professor gave an example: A majority of people have headaches, but not everyone sees a doctor for concern of a possible brain tumor as the cause of headaches.4. Should I be afraid of having ALS after 1 yr of twitches, since there are people with ALS who endorse having twitches prior to having clinical weakness and atrophy? twitches without any weakness or atrophy is completely benign. Usually, other omnious signs should be present within 2-3 months since this disease is progressive. 5. Again a professor commented: "everyone with ALS will endorse twitches 1-3yrs prior to weakness or atrophy because everyone has twitches period. Well I hope this helps for anyone who have been searching other sites and found insecurity from other people. My advice is to not search other sites or google anything that has the letters ALS forward or backwards. Hope I helped.
Lovely