Jitter Remains Stable Throughout a Single Fiber EMG Session in Healthy and Myasthenic Muscles

Abstract

Fatigability is the hallmark of myasthenia gravis (MG). It is not clear, however, whether there is an analogous increase in jitter during the course of a single fiber electromyography (SFEMG) session. The individual jitter values of all potentials of 76 normal and 44 myasthenic orbicularis oculi muscles were assigned a rank number according to their temporal order in which they were collected and linear regression was performed to determine if the slope of the regression line was significantly different from zero. Control and MG subjects displayed rather flat linear regression lines with non-significant positive or negative slopes. Accordingly, ROC analysis yielded areas under the curve near 0.5. We conclude that there is no systematic jitter increase during the collection of 20 potential pairs in a typical SFEMG session.