Tag: how common is SCA
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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…
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I’ll Take Mine Rare
Ataxia is often described as a rare disease. For a long time, I presumed the word rare was the casual use of an adjective, but it turns out that rare disease is a specific term that’s been around for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_disease In U.S. law, a rare disease is a disease that affects less than…