Dr. James Gratwick

No.

No.

It was unfortunately a rarer condition, often mistaken for Parkinson's disease early on, and one which carries a worse prognosis.

It was of course a shock to him, I remember that.

It's never nice having to give this diagnosis to anybody.

I'm afraid that the life expectancy for corticobasal syndrome is around five years to eight years.

Eventually, the muscles of swallowing will become like that, and then you can't swallow.

And there's two elements to that.

One, you can't feed.

So it becomes questions about do we need to place feeding tubes through the stomach to feed people?

But even around that, if there's difficulty swallowing your own saliva, then you can swallow it quite easily into your lungs.

If that does happen, it can very quickly lead to pneumonia.

And that is the primary cause of death, usually in corticobasal syndrome.

So you would find in corticobosal syndrome that, yes, if you had that, the appearances, the colours, if you like, on those kind of scans would be reduced.

So in these conditions, as we've said, they're not treatable, not reversible.

So any reduction in levels of dopamine or glucose in the brain, which is what those kind of scans pick up, you would not expect to see it improve.

It would only ever gradually get thinner.

Certainly not in corticobasal syndrome.

Well, it's certainly not at all consistent with patients I've seen with corticobasal syndrome, or CBD for that matter, just to be clear.

One thing that's often very prominent is loss of facial expression.