--remember, we talked about this before; "classic" CIDP generally comes with far more motor symptomology than Alan has ever had, yet there are sensory variants that have minimal or no motor symptoms.

As Dahlek notes, there are numerous autoimmune mediated neuropathies; many of these are purely or primarily sensory, and can be caused by a number of different mechanisms. The research neurologists, such as Latov and company, suspect that a good number of sensory axonal neuropathies that are currently labelled "idiopahtic" probably have autoimmune genesis; the autoantibodies that medite them just haven't been discovered yet. (The ones that we do know about have only been identified over the last 20-25 years or so. The research is slow and painstaking.)

But--in thinking back over the tests you said Alan had (not all of which I remember, and I don't have the leisure to check back all your old posts now); did he ever get titred up for anti-sulfatide antibodies?

Check this out:

http://www.neuro.wustl.edu/neuromusc...html#sulfatide

There are also a few antibodies to nerve gangliosides that can cause similar symptoms that you can read about in the same section (that are very rare)>

The other thing that came to my memory is that you had said Alan at one point had a positive anti-nuclear antibody titer (ANA)--that leads to suspicion of some sort of vasculitic autoimmunity.

Both of these can cause primarily sensory neuropathic symptoms in the extremities. The spinal fluid protein will tend to make neuros think CIDP or its variants, but there may be other immune processes going on that wouldn't fall neatly into that category (and in this realm, the categories are still quite fluid, anyway--we really don't know all that much about autoimmunity, and whether, as the people on the gluten boards who talk about zonulin and tight junction dysfunction assert, all autoimmune processes start from a leaky gut letting pathogens pass through that the body overreacts to. Now THAT'S a nice read if you want to pursue it.)