Symptoms of Alexander’s disease

Alexander disease is a rare white matter lesion of the brain. It usually presents with white matter abnormalities and macrocephaly, mainly in the frontal lobes. Symptoms of Alexander’s disease can be clinically classified as infantile, juvenile, or adult depending on the age of the child. The adult form is relatively rare because most children with Alexandra disease survive for more than 10 years. The infantile form is more common, and children generally exhibit developmental delays, giant brains, and, in severe cases, epilepsy. As the child grows older, he or she may exhibit psychomotor delays and tetraplegia. For this infantile form of Alexander’s disease, there is no effective clinical drug treatment, only symptomatic supportive treatment. There is also a juvenile form of Alexander’s disease, which has a general age of onset of six to teenage years and can survive for ten years. In this juvenile form, the patient may show more symptoms of brainstem involvement, such as pseudobulbar palsy, swallowing difficulties, choking and coughing, and generally no mega brain, but the intelligence is slightly worse than normal children, and it is also a slow progressive decline.