People with paramyloidosis in the family should see a doctor “at the slightest symptom.”

People with a family history of paramyloidosis should see a doctor “at the slightest symptom” because treatment is more effective if started early, the call center responsible for the Corino de Andrade Unit (UCA) warned this Friday. located in Harbour.

“If people know that this disease is inherited, do not run from doctors. We continue to receive many patients who have a family history, some know they are carriers of the mutation, and when they show symptoms they try to “fake it”. If someone feels something, let them look for us,” Teresa Coelho urged.

Speaking to Lusa on National Paramyloidosis Day, the head of UCA stressed that “current treatments are much more effective if started very early.”

“And there are many things that are corrupted by the development of this disease that do not come back. We must fight the disease as soon as possible. The younger the patients, the more we are concerned about this situation,” he said. .

UCA is part of the Centro Hospitalar Universitário de Santo António (CHUSA), the national referral center for the treatment of paramyloidosis.

It bears the name of the doctor who first described this disease, popularly known as “foot disease”.

Corino de Andrade, Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar (ICBAS), described the disease first discovered in Povoa de Varzim in 1939.

“This is still a brilliant description worth referring to, although today we have a different view of the disease,” said Teresa Coelho, who has led UCA since 1990.

“We know that there are many people who have it, even if they have less knowledge of the family history. They start the disease much later. This is what we call the late onset of the disease, ”the neurologist and neurophysiologist described.

The symptoms of young adults are related to neurology: loss of sensation, weight, strength, and control over the functioning of certain organs.

Older patients have a high burden of heart disease.

These are common symptoms that deserve attention, a burn or wound that the person does not know how he did it because he loses sensitivity to pain or temperature.

According to Teresa Coelho, the number of patients with paramyloidosis has increased.

“It is not the incidence that is increasing, the number of new cases is not increasing, but the number of living cases is increasing, because we are significantly improving the survival rate,” he stressed.

According to official estimates, there were recently more than 2000 patients with paramyloidosis in Portugal.