Methods: We conducted a retrospective medical record review to determine the survival of 455 Korean multiple system atrophy (MSA) patients and examined the effect of clinical factors that could possibly influence survival. The patients comprised 222 men and 233 women.
Results: Age at onset was 60.1 ± 8.8 years (mean ± SD) and did not differ between the sexes. Parkinsonism was the most prevalent initial symptom, followed by cerebellar dysfunction and dysautonomia. Age at onset was significantly older in patients with predominant parkinsonism at the last visit (MSA-P) than in the other patients. At the time of data collection, 107 patients had died. Median survival time was 10 years. The survival rate of women was slightly better than that of men, especially in MSA-P patients.
Conclusions: Survival was not affected by age at onset, initial symptom, or predominant symptom at the last visit or by the presence of autonomic symptoms or multiple symptoms at disease onset.
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