Introduction: Motor neuron disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease that affects the motor nervous system. Consequently the weakness, spasticity and/or atrophy of skeletal muscles appear. In some cases, the ALS disease starts with bulbar signs such as dysphagia, disartria, ineffective cough, laryngospazm and aspiration. In time, weaknes of respiratory muscles appears and contributes to various respiratory complications. Because of that, it is necessary to suggest artificial respiration support. There are two types - non invasive mechanical ventilation (NIV) or invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV). Some researches showed, that NIV improves quality of ALS patient lives and has an impact on their survival. There are authors that said, that bulbar patients do not tolerate or tolerate NIV worse than pseudobulbar patients. Purpose: In our research we wanted to compare how bulbar or pseudobulbar patients reacted on NIV, based on their signs and symptoms. Methods: We analyzed some parameters from medical documentations and parameters from memory cards of ventilators for non-invasive ventilation. Demographic datas were analyzed with descriptive statistics, some of the parameters we analyzed with statistic T-test and the survival time of patients of both groups, it is presented with survival curve/graph, where we used the Kaplan-Meier method and logrank test. Results: We divided all patients in four groups, based on theirs signs and symptoms. We analyzed only 48 patients (two groups). In the first group, there were 16 patients, that had bulbar type (without pseudobulbar signs) of ALS disease, 9 of them used NIV, but 7 of them refused or did not tolerate NIV. In the second group, there were 32 patients with pseudobulbar type (without lower motor neuron dissfunction in bulbar region) of ALS. Twenty of those patients used NIV, but 12 of them refused the use of NIV. Discussion and conclussion: We came to the conclusion, that NIV has a significant impact on the time of survival of bouth groups of patients (bulbar/pseudobulbar type of disease). The time of survival was longer in a group of patients with pseudobulbar type than in a group of patients with bulbar type of ALS, if they used NIV more than 4 hours a day. We also discovered, that the use of NIV was recommended later in a group of patients with pseudobulbar type than in a group of patients with bulbar type of disease, because of slower progression of the disease. The time from the beginning of the disease till death, was also longer in a group of patients with pseudobulbar type of ALS disease than in a group of bulbar type.
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