Reply To: Polyethylene / Mylar

Hello,

I am sorry that your son has acquired CIDP. I hope his IVIg treatments will bring him back to normal function.

There are no studies that I know of linking CIDP to chemical exposure. Is it possible that these chemicals caused CIDP? Perhaps; he may be unusually sensitive to them and the sensitivity expressed itself as CIDP. Proving it, however, would be much harder. There just aren’t enough of us (a good thing, really) to allow for the appropriate statistical analysis. There are between 3,300 and 30,000 people in the USA with CIDP; the number depends on which prevalence study you believe. There are about 750,000 people in plastic products manufacturing and another 750,000 in the chemical manufacturing sector. That means between 14 and 130 people who work in those areas likely would have developed the disease anyway. It would take a larger sample, I think (I am not an epidemiologist, so I don’t know how much larger) to establish a statistically valid measure.

~MarkEns