Hirayama Disease: A Case of an Albanian Woman Clinically Stabilized Without Surgery

Abstract

Hirayama Disease (HD) is a rare clinical condition that usually affects young people with preference for Asian males. It appears with unilateral distal amyotrophy or asymmetric bilateral amyotrophy of an upper limb which is to refer to an involvement of the spinal metamers C7-C8-T1. A clinical case of a female patient of Albanian nationality is described, with onset of the disease in adulthood and clinical and electrophysiological features suggestive of HD, without any characteristic imaging findings. Clinical investigations, EMG and radiological data facilitated the diagnosis and allowed the exclusion of degenerative forms of the motor neuron and radiculopathies. In this paper, we want to point out that the diagnosis of this pathology should be hypothesized even in the absence of characteristic epidemiological and imaging data.