The Rocky Mountain MS Center’s Dr. Amanda Piquet — now the Céline Dion Foundation Endowed Chair in Autoimmune Neurology — recently published a new study in the medical journal Neurology that may shed new light on the prevalence of Stiff Person Syndrome.
Stiff Person Syndrome is a rare disease that’s received more attention recently as world-renowned singer-songwriter Céline Dion has talked openly and publicly about her own diagnosis. The disease was often cited as being “one in a million,” but reliable data on the actual prevalence in the general population was lacking.
Dr. Piquet and her team conducted a large-scale study of data collected over a period spanning about 10 years, and discovered that the “one in a million” estimates may be a long way off. In their Journal Neurology article, Piquet’s team cite a new estimated prevalence between 1.36 and 2.11 per 100,000 people.
It should be noted that the published data measured a relatively small data set of people within the University of Colorado Health (UCH ) system. Although more and larger studies are needed to apply this new estimate to larger populations, the data indicates previous estimates are possibly much lower than the actual rate of Stiff Person Syndrome in the general population.
You can read the entire published study at the journal Neurology.