Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) is a common inherited muscular dystrophy presented clinically with slowly progressive weakness and wasting of facial and limb muscles and rare bulbar muscle involvement. We present herein a 70-year-old man who was a known case of FSHD with complaint of 15-day history of progressive difficulty in chewing and dysarthria and was found to have myastheni...

A major advance in the molecular diagnosis of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy is the recently reported elimination of confounding DNA fragments arising from homologous sequences located at 10q26. In order to evaluate the specificity and sensitivity of this important diagnostic test, we have compared a group of 130 patients fulfilling the diagnostic criteria for FSHD with 200 control subj...

Treatment of dominantly inherited muscle disorders remains a difficult task considering the need to eliminate the pathogenic gene product in a body-wide fashion. We show here that it is possible to reverse dominant muscle disease in a mouse model of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD). FSHD is a common form of muscular dystrophy associated with a complex cascade of epigenetic events f...

OBJECTIVE Pathogenesis in facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) appears to be due to aberrant expression, particularly in skeletal muscle nuclei, of the full-length isoform of DUX4 (DUX4-FL). Expression of DUX4-FL is known to alter gene expression and to be cytotoxic, but cell responses to DUX4-FL are not fully understood. Our study was designed to identify cellular mechanisms of pathog...

In any family study using information gathered retrospectively, the influence of the method of ascertainment on the observed segregation ratio in sibships needs careful consideration. The study of kindred members from outside the area of primary ascertainment is invaluable in providing segregation data with minimal ascertainment bias. For facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), using thi...

The DUX4 transcription factor is encoded by a retrogene embedded in each unit of the D4Z4 macrosatellite repeat. DUX4 is normally expressed in the cleavage-stage embryo, whereas chromatin repression prevents DUX4 expression in most somatic tissues. Failure of this repression causes facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) due to mis-expression of DUX4 in skeletal muscle. In this study, we ...

The short D4Z4 repeat on chromosome 4q35 is a confirmatory genetic cause of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), which presents with no renal complications. We herein report a five-year-old girl previously diagnosed with Coat's-like retinopathy, deafness, and mental retardation, who was found to have early-onset, severe FSHD. Despite the absence of muscle weakness, a Southern blot ana...

Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) is one of the most prevalent adult muscular dystrophies. The common clinical signs usually appear during the second decade of life but when the first molecular dysregulations occur is still unknown. Our aim was to determine whether molecular dysregulations can be identified during FSHD fetal muscle development. We compared muscle biopsies derived fr...

Deletion of a subset of the D4Z4 macrosatellite repeats in the subtelomeric region of chromosome 4q causes facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) when occurring on a specific haplotype of 4qter (4qA161). Several genes have been examined as candidates for causing FSHD, including the DUX4 homeobox gene in the D4Z4 repeat, but none have been definitively shown to cause the disease, nor has ...

Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), a common myopathy, is an autosomal dominant disease of unknown molecular mechanism. Almost all FSHD patients carry deletions of an integral number of tandem 3.3 kilobase repeats, termed D4Z4, located on chromosome 4q35. Here, we find that in FSHD muscle, 4q35 genes located upstream of D4Z4 are inappropriately overexpressed. We show that an element ...