but these patients also expressed febrile infections. dr. van der knaap used mri as well as magnetic-resonance spectroscopy and determined that ongoing cystic degeneration of the cerebral white matter and matter rarefaction was more descriptive of the disease rather than hypomyelination and proposed the name vanishing white matter. the name proposed by dr. schiffmann in 1994, childhood ataxia with central hypomyelination (cach) is another commonly accepted name.