VIDEO: Cardiac, nervous dysfunction diminish quality of life in Friedreich’s ataxia

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript, which has been slightly edited for clarity. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

So with FA, people tend to talk about it in disjointed ways, loss of balance, nervous system dysfunction, cardiac dysfunction, vision loss, diabetes, and scoliosis. But when you put those all together, it affects every aspect of life progressively over time. Initially it's walking, but then it moves on to hands and speech. It can move on late to vision, in which people who lose vision say if they had one thing that they could correct, it would be their vision, because it's such a dominating aspect of everyone's quality of life. And then you have the risk for early death from cardiac disease exclusively. So it's affecting all of these in serial format, as it finishes affecting gait, and you move to being fully wheelchair-bound. Then it moves on to hands and speech. So it is always worsening quality of life over time.