In today’s episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Jacob Sands, MD, and Shailee Shah, MD, about considerations for diagnosing and managing Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome (LEMS), particularly in the context of small cell lung cancer (SCLC). Dr Sands is associate chief of the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology and the Oncology Medical Director of the International Patient Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr Shah is a clinical assistant professor of neurology (MS/neuroimmunology) at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.
In our exclusive interview, Drs Sands and Shah discussed LEMS symptom identification, the importance of paraneoplastic panels for assessing neurologic dysfunction in patients with SCLC, the need for specific autoantibody testing, and what guidelines currently note as best practices for the diagnosis of this disease.