André Barbeau and the oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy in French Canada and North America.

André Barbeau (1931-1986) is best known world-wide in the neurologic community for his contributions to the study of Parkinson's disease, Huntington's chorea and Friedreich's ataxia. But in Québec, Canada, his name is associated with oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD), often called here 'maladie de Barbeau', on which he conducted a series of genealogic, genetic and clinical studies early in his career, most intensively from 1964 to 1966. He then demonstrated that most of the reported cases in North America could be traced back to French-Canadian ancestors. Furthermore, he identified this ancestor couple and linked them with a probable case in Niort, in France. Because he was the first to see over a hundred patients, his clinical studies were definitive. He did little work on OPMD after 1967 when he rushed back to the study of L-DOPA in the treatment of Parkinson's disease, a work that he had previously so brilliantly pioneered.