Welcome to Periodic Paralysis International!
Our website reflects our mission to make medically accurate, up-to-date information about the periodic paralyses accessible to patients, caretakers and physicians.
Our goal is to help create successful partnerships between physicians, researchers and periodic paralysis patients in order to speed diagnosis and improve therapy and management strategies, thereby improving quality of life and clinical outcomes for patients.
Get the Popcorn! We're going to the movies to see The Action Potential!
Puzzled by the terms membrane potential, sodium channel, potassium channel and sodium-potassium pump? This cute cartoon explains what each is and shows how the potassium and sodium channels, and the sodium potassium pump maintain muscle membrane potential. Although this is talking about nerve axons the principles are exactly the same in muscle membrane. Click here to watch.
New Article:
Penn State researcher counts the ways poetess Browning may have had rare disease
By Tom Avril; Philadephia Inquirer Staff Writer
Scholars have proposed a number of explanations for the muscle weakness and other ailments that plagued the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But none of these after-the-fact diagnoses - from anxiety to tuberculosis - seemed to fit the symptoms perfectly. Now Pennsylvania State University researcher Anne Buchanan thinks she has cracked the case, as the result of an intensely personal connection.
Her theory: The poet suffered from a rare condition called hypokalemic periodic paralysis, the same illness that plagues Buchanan's own daughter. The researcher makes her case in the current issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, based on clues in Barrett Browning's diary and letters, including those written to the man who would become her husband, the poet Robert Browning. Read more:
New Article: Calibrating the Cardy Potassium Meter
Featured Reading:
- Review Article of Periodic Paralyses from Oxford Journals (2006) : Periodic paralyses (PPs) are rare inherited channelopathies that manifest as abnormal, often potassium (K+) sensitive, muscle membrane excitability leading to episodic flaccid paralysis. Hypokalaemic, hyperkalaemic PP and Andersen-Tawil syndrome are genetically heterogeneous. Over the past decade mutations in genes encoding three ion channels, CACN1AS, SCN4A and KCNJ2, have been identified and account for at least 70% of the identified cases of PP and several allelic disorders. No prospective clinical studies have followed sufficiently large cohorts with characterized molecular lesions to draw precise conclusions... read more
- Physician's Reading Room: We've added a library of journal articles on all the forms of periodic paralysis, all by experts in the field. Days of reading here.
In the Goodie Bag This Week!
- A handy chart of many of the different potassium supplements prescribed for Hypokalemic Periodic Paralysis, with name, type of potassium (chloride, bicarbonate, etc) and mEq per dose.
