Out of Order

Category: Muckraking

  • At Risk of Being Complete Nonsense

    I see things like this: “Ataxia can strike anyone at any time regardless of age, gender, or race.” Misleading expressions like this are common for ataxia—blurring the lines between spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) and other ataxia forms—and Huntington’s disease (HD). This line of reasoning is ridiculous for dominantly inherited genetic diseases such as SCA and HD.…

  • Alternative Facts (Rarity, Part Two)

    I was diligently trying to understand the prevalence of ataxia compared to other diseases, and I didn’t expect to find numbers that were inflated by an order of magnitude. After I posted my article, I started noticing references to 150,000 (people in the U.S. with various kinds of ataxia), when in fact the high estimate…