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Aspiration pneumonia and death in Huntington's disease.

Abstract

Huntington's disease (HD) is a progressive neurodegenerative autosomal dominant disease characterized by choreatic and hypokinetic movements, disturbed behaviour, and cognitive decline. Pneumonia is the most common cause of death, followed by cardiovasculair diseases. It has been suggested that choking is the causative underlying factor for pneumonia in HD. As a detailed specification of the type of pneumonia has never been performed, we analyzed the records of our Brain Bank containing 224 cases to determine the exact cause of death and type of pneumonia. The conclusion is that the majority (86.8%) of our HD patients where the cause of death could be identified died from aspiration pneumonia.

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    • Authors

    Heemskerk AW, Roos RA

    Institution

    Researcher and Speech and Language Pathologist (SLP) at LUMC, dept. Neurology, Leiden, The Netherlands and LUMC, Leiden, The Netherlands.

    Source

    PLoS currents 4: 2012 pg RRN1293

    Pub Type(s)

    Journal Article

    Language

    eng

    PubMed ID

    22307361