A bone-marrow transplant has been attempted in the late infantile form of NCL with disappointing results; while the transplant may have slowed the onset of the disease, the child eventually developed the disease and died in 1998.Trials testing the effectiveness of bone-marrow transplants for infantile NCL in Finland have also been disappointing, with only a slight slowing of disease reported. Immunosuppressants
In late 2007,  Dr. David Pearce et al. reported that Cellcept, an immunosuppressant medication commonly used in bone-marrow transplants, may be useful in slowing down the progress of juvenile NCL. Enzyme replacement therapy
On April 27, 2017, the U.S. FDA approved cerliponase alfa as the first specific treatment for NCL. Epidemiology
Incidence can vary greatly from type-to-type, and from country-to-country.In Germany, one study reported an incidence of 1.28 per 100,000.A study in Italy reported an incidence of 0.56 per 100,000.A study in Norway reported an incidence of 3.9 per 100,000 using the years from 1978 to 1999, with a lower rate in earlier decades. History
19th century
The first probable instances of this condition were reported in 1826 in a Norwegian medical journal by Dr. Christian Stengel, who described 4 affected siblings in a small mining community in Norway. Although no pathological studies were performed on these children the clinical descriptions are so succinct that the diagnosis of the Spielmeyer-Sjogren (juvenile) type is fully justified. 1900 to 1950
More fundamental observations were reported by F. E. Batten in 1903, and by Heinrich Vogt in 1905, who performed extensive clinicopathological studies on several families.
For example, if a person has not spoken for awhile and then wants to speak, their tongue may be stiff at first causing the words to come out a little garbled, but after a few seconds of trying to speak, the tongue muscle will loosen up and then they can speak normally for the remainder of the time that they are conversing.Patients report that repeated contraction of muscle alleviates present myotonia with each contraction, such that myotonia is almost absent after a few contractions of the same muscle. The effect lasts about five minutes. There have been several proposed mechanisms for this phenomenon, but none have been demonstrated conclusively; one hypothesis is that the Na+/K+-ATPase is stimulated during the myotonic activity by increased intracellular Na+ in the cytosol of the muscle cell, increasing the activity of the Na+/K+-ATPase. However, in experiments with patients where the Na+/K+-ATPase had been blocked in the underarm by infusion of the Na+/K+-ATPase-blocker Ouabain, no effect on warm-up was observed. Another hypothesis states that the few remaining functional chloride channels in muscle may become more active with increased muscle activity.It has been proposed that inactivation of sodium channel protein type 4 subunit alpha, residing in skeletal muscle, could play an important role in the warm-up phenomenon. In particular, slow inactivation of the channel is believed to have a spatial and temporal extent that is correlated to warm-up and therefore may provide a plausible cause.