Muscle - Specific Autoantibody to Carbonic Anhydrase Iii in a Patient with Myofibrillar Myopathy

5th Aim Congress ITALIAN ASSOCIATION FOR MYOLOGY Jolly Hotel delle Terme – Ischia, Naples, Italy, June 16-18, 2005 Foreward I am delighted to be asked to write a foreward to the 5 Meeting of Italian Society of Myology, since this is a remarkably comprehensive meeting and contributes significantly to our store of knowledge in Myology with several oral communications, posters and case presentations (Muscle Club) and follows the previous meetings in Camogli, Torino, Padova and Taormina. During the three days of the Congress lectures will be held on the following topics: Heart in Muscle Disorders and Advances in Therapy of Muscle Disorders. Moreover I am touched by the fact that there will be before a Meeting Session of the Gaetano Corte Prize winners (last year in Kusadasi the recipients were dr. George Karpati, Dr. Jane Miller and myself) because so many distinguished scientists and doctors and clinical investigators in the field of neuromuscular disorders are here. All doctors and scientists must have an inspiration by Gaetano Conte: it is good to pay tribute to this Neapolitan doctor. In fact all doctors must on occasion believe that they have discovered something new or hope that they bring a significant contribution, to find there that someone else had made the identical discovery many years earlier. In fact X-linked severe pseudohypertrophic muscular dystrophy has been named by the great French neurologist Duchenne but the contribution of Edward Meryon in pathology has been demonstrated by Alan Emery and probably the first clinical description is the one by Gaetano Conte as prof. Nigro will illustrate in his opening lecture, although I think the disease must have been present several hundred of years before because of the high rate of spontaneous mutation of dystrophin gene. Therefore in beginning research in muscular dystrophy we must acknowledge the contribution all physicians involved in this discovery i.e. Duchenne de Boulogne, Edward Meryon, Gaetano Conte, as well as the molecular biologists that described the gene and its protein product (L.M. Kunkel and E.P. Hoffmann) because muscular dystrophy is world-wide and I believe it will attract medical historians now and in the future.