Could the tongue be an early sign of Charcot disease? A test could help diagnose the disease earlier.
Today, there is no specific treatment or means of diagnosis for Charcot disease. These are two major issues in research into this neurodegenerative disease, also called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Researchers have long been interested in our muscles… and in particular our tongue.
It is thought that the legs or arms are first affected by the disease, but so is the tongue, like other motor muscles. It is even one of the first areas of the body to be impacted in the so-called bulbar form of the disease, which represents around 30% of cases according to Inserm. “In affected people, the tongue muscles – like many others in the body – gradually weaken and, unfortunately, atrophy,” explained Dr. Thomas Shaw, neuroscientist and author of the study on the subject.
As a result, the tongue muscles become smaller. Since this sign can be difficult for doctors to assess with the naked eye, Dr. Shaw and his team came up with a solution.
This solution is MRI! The good news is that a standard brain scan, which is already one of the methods for diagnosing Charcot disease, “often captures the tongue in addition to the brain,” says Dr. Shaw. With his team, he examined several hundred MRI scans, including some conducted on patients with the disease. With this data and the help of artificial intelligence, they “were able to obtain precise measurements of the volume and shape of the tongue muscles”, and were able to observe “significant differences between the scans of people with ALS and those of healthy people”.
The loss of tongue muscles could thus represent an early sign of Charcot disease. An important discovery when we know that the current time to diagnose the disease after the first symptoms “is approximately 12 months”, recalls Dr Shaw. The earlier the diagnosis is made, the more the patient has “quicker access to treatment, support, clinical trials”…
Such an examination could both help detect the disease more quickly, but also “potentially tell us about life expectancy”. Dr Shaw specifies that “people with lower tongue volume had a less favorable prognosis, our own results confirm this”. On average, people with Charcot disease die within 3 to 5 years.
