Update 20 - Survey Results Part 7

Minor delay between this and the last one due to a trip to Paris (business).  My one observation is that all hotels throughout the world now look the same and I'm sure the air is!

This is the last part of the results around the effects of treatments.  I tried to do some analysis based on gender and illness.  The tables below show the different results for Males & Females with either GBS or CIDP:

  

To see these results graphically, I have produced the following charts:

The above charts and the ones for CIDP below are shown as a percentage of the overall people who have recieved these treatments, so the scale is a percentage and not a number.  For the specific numbers, please refer to the tables at the top of this section.

What these show, along with the tables, is that the actual treatments with most effect on GBS are IVIG and Plasma.  Also the tables show that these are the two most recommended treatments as well.  Steroids do seem to have some effect, but less on Males than Females for GBS.  Immuno-suppresants appear high in the chart for Females, but this is due to only 3 samples being available, so this is too few to draw a reasonable conclusion from (in my opinion).

These again show IVIG as being potentially most successful, though Steroids do have a more major impact (especially for Females).  It also does seem that Immuno-suppresants are used much more with CIDP, though there success rate is questionable (again higher with Females).

Please note these are statistics produced from the survey and not specific recommendations to any one about treatments.  If I could I would love to examine the treatments recommended against location in the countries/world, but I do not have enough data to go on.

This concludes the treatments and their effectiveness based on the 350 completed surveys from August 2012. Next I'll be looking into the treatment periods and how people are coping.

Update 19 - Survey Results Part 6

The next set are concerned with differences between female and male treatments/effects:

The graphs above show a similar ratio of the types of treatments, though as slightly more females have filled in the survey there are more results for them (281 against 265).  What is interesting is that the number of other treatments and their effect on females is much higher than males.  The actual treatments recommended, percentage wise, didn't vary much at all between the two for the normal ones.

Below are the effectiveness charts for each treatment against males and females:

 As you can see, and has been the case throughout the effectiveness of treatments across all segments, IVIG has a significant impact on both males and females.  However it does seem to have a better major effect on females (10% difference), whereas males are higher in the minor/none categories?

Steroids seem to follow a similar pattern to IVIG, however though the Major effectiveness has a 5% difference, the some is much higher with females (14%), thus the minor/none are much higher.  This does seem to indicate (even more than with IVIG) that there is a significantly better effect of steroids for females.

There is definitely a pattern forming with the males having Plasma being improved way less than females, what is most interesting here is the difference between the none's (18%).  That in my view is massive.

This one is even worse than the other three, with females having a much more positive reaction to this treatment than males, there is 20% difference between the major effectiveness.

Please note the actual numbers of people having the last two treatments is much lower than for IVIG and Steroids, so this may be impacting the figures slightly.  However it can't be disputed that there is a pattern of better reaction to treatments in general from the females than the males.  Now work that one out?