Stimulation-Free Remote MUNE (REMUNE)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Developing a stimulation-free remote motor unit number estimate (REMUNE) in Motor Neurone Disease (MND).
IRAS ID
318740
Contact name
Christopher Shaw
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King’s College London
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
N/A, N/A
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is an adult-onset degenerative disease affecting the upper and lower motor neurons which are responsible to carry away signals from the central nervous system towards the muscles to produce movements. With MND, the signals no longer reach the muscles resulting in muscle weakness/wasting with an average life expectancy of 3-years from symptom onset. Consequently, there is a huge drive to discover novel biomarkers, which can reliably track disease progression over time.
MUNIX is a technique enabling the accurate estimate of the number of functional motor units (MUs) allowing the monitoring of the disease progression and therefore of the MU loss. However, this method involves electrically stimulating the relevant peripheral nerve and also requires the participants to regularly visit the hospital to undertake this assessment.
Bashford et al (2019) have been conducting a 12-month longitudinal study of 25 patients, performing high-density surface EMG every two months. They validated an automated technique to process these large data sets. However, this study showed a significant dropout rate (9/25) owing to patients' extreme discomfort which electrical stimulations can induce in some participants and consequently prevent the completion of the assessment.
Therefore, by introducing a stimulation-free motor unit number estimate, this would enable us to recruit/keep the participants responding badly to the stimulations. In this study, the patients will undergo 6 hospital-based assessments during which we'll acquire eight high-density surface EMG recordings from four muscles bilaterally and MUNIX data. The patients will be enrolled for 12-months.
REC name
South Central - Berkshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/SC/0444
Date of REC Opinion
2 Nov 2022
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion