Seed Funding: Italy

Dr Alessandro Dinoto

Project title: Epidemiology of autoimmune encephalitis and its mimics in the province of Verona, Italy

Project lead: Alessandro Dinoto, MD

Institution: Department of Neurosciences, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona

Awarded in 2023

The advances in the clinical characterization and diagnostic assays have led to an increased recognition of autoimmune encephalitides: from being an overlooked condition, autoimmune encephalitis has now become a relatively frequent diagnosis in clinical practice.

The diagnosis of autoimmune encephalitis is based on specific criteria and requires excluding other conditions that may resemble it on clinical and radiological grounds. An erroneous diagnosis of autoimmune encephalitis may delay access to treatment and be potentially harmful for patients, as they may be exposed to unnecessary immunotherapy.

The project entitled “Epidemiology of autoimmune encephalitis and its mimics in the province of Verona, Italy” aims to investigate the frequency of these disorders and their mimics in a well delimitated geographical area (the province of Verona, Italy, with more than 900.000 inhabitants), in which all samples of patients with suspected autoimmune encephalitis are referred for antibody testing in a single diagnostic laboratory. The investigators will review each diagnosis and evaluate whether patients were affected by autoimmune encephalitis or by a different condition that mimicked it, to compare clinical, radiological, and serological features in the two groups, and to investigate the frequency of these disorder through epidemiological measures. The potential results of this project are important to help clinicians in distinguishing autoimmune encephalitis from its mimics, with relevant implications in terms of treatment and prognosis.