HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — Regular season football starts tonight, but Dallas Cowboy Travis Frederick is sidelined for treatment of Guillain–Barré (pronounced gee-OWN BURR-ay) syndrome. He was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease in August.
Holland Hospital’s Matthew Hilton, D.O., of the Lakeshore Health Partners Family and Sports Medicine office, said Frederick was smart to get his persistent tingling symptoms — often called “stingers” in sports — checked out. There’s no simple test for Guillain–Barré, which Hilton said happens when the body’s own immune system attacks the body’s nervous system. About 3,000 to 6,000 Americans are diagnosed with this syndrome evey year.
“What happens with Guillain–Barré is, usually, the patient has some kind of infection, like a typical respiratory infection, or even commonly with this conditon, they’ll have something in the intestinal tract, like a bacterial infection, ” he said.
There’s no simple test for the syndrome, Hilton says. Doctors look at recent illnesses, and symptoms such as tingling that often starts in the hands and feet and travels toward the torso. Without treatment, a patient could become paralyzed and die, he said.
Hilton said treatment can include high-dose immunoglobulin therapy or plasmapheresis — a plasma replacement process.
“They take out your plasma, they give you new plasma,” Hilton said, “and the idea with that is, they’re removing these kind of rogue antibodies that aren’t doing their job and are in fact hurting you and replace it with fresh stuff that’s going to take care of you.”
The replacement plasma gives a patient’s body time to begin making healthy antibodies again, he said.
Frederick, a 27-year-old Wisconsin native, is expected to be among the 70 percent of those diagnosed with GBS to fully recover.
Recovery can take anywhere from a few months to up to two years, according to the GBS/CIDP Foundation International — and some patients may experiece a relapse at some point in their lives, according to the National Institutes of Health. Listen to the full interview online.
