[Treatment of Meige disease with a GABA receptor agonist]

The spontaneous occurrnce of blepharospasm and dystonic movements in face muscles, particularly those of the perioral and mandibular regions, has been named Meige's disease. Other dystonic features as spasmodic torticollis, dysphagia, spasmodic dysphonia and segmental dystonia of the limbs may, eventually, be present in the same patient. There is very little knowledge about the pathology of this disease. Many hypotheses concerning the pathophysiology of this entity have been put forward, most of them correlating the clinical response to several drugs with known action on the neurotransmitter system of the brain. There are some evidences that it may exist a dopaminergic preponderance in the disease. In the nigro-striatal pathway, one of the retrograde loops in the feed-back control of dopamine synthesis by nigral neurons is dependent on GABA. Increasing GABA activity through GABA agonists that cross the blood-brain barrier could result in a decreased dopaminergic action in the nigro-striatal pathway and, thus, ameliorate the dystonic symptoms which might have been produced by its increased function. We have used baclofen, a GABA-agonist drug, to treat five patients with Meige's disease, in a single-blinded trial. These were four females and one male, with age ranging from 50 to 63 years. The drug was started at 20mg/day, being increased by 10mg each three days reaching a maximum dose of 70mg/day. One of the patients showed marked improvement of blepharospasm and orofacial dystonia and a second patient had a moderate improvement in the same symptoms. Another patient showed moderate improvement of limb dystonia, but had no benefit in the facial movements.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)