An autosomal dominant disease characterised by amyotrophy of predominantly distal upper limb muscles and mild pyramidal features is described. There are sensory changes in older patients, whilst in others the disease presents itself as a disorder of motor neurons. Owing to variations in the clinical picture, it may be difficult to distinguish this disease in individual patients from distal spin...

A growing number of medical research teams have begun to explore the experimental advantages of using a genetic animal model, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, with a view to enhancing our understanding of genes underlying human congenital disorders. In this study, we have compared sequences of positionally cloned human disease genes with the C.elegans database of predicted genes. Drawi...

Roughly 3 million years ago, an inactivating deletion occurred in CMAH, the human gene encoding CMP-Neu5Ac (cytidine-5'-monophospho-N-acetylneuraminic acid) hydroxylase (Chou HH, Takematsu H, Diaz S, Iber J, Nickerson E, Wright KL, Muchmore EA, Nelson DL, Warren ST, Varki A. 1998. A mutation in human CMP-sialic acid hydroxylase occurred after the Homo-Pan divergence. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 95:...

Unregulated Ca(2+) entry is thought to underlie muscular dystrophy. Here, we generated skeletal-muscle-specific transgenic (TG) mice expressing the Na(+)-Ca(2+) exchanger 1 (NCX1) to model its identified augmentation during muscular dystrophy. The NCX1 transgene induced dystrophy-like disease in all hind-limb musculature, as well as exacerbated the muscle disease phenotypes in δ-sarcoglycan (Sg...

Almost 100 years ago, Steinert (1909), Batten and Gibb (1909), independently described Myotonic Dystrophy type 1 (DM1) that is now recognized as the most common form of muscular dystrophies in adults and the second most common type of muscular dystrophy after Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, affecting 1 in 8000 individuals globally (Harper, 1989). DM1 is a genetic disorder, which is inherited in an...

Neuromuscular disorders are known to be associated with cardiac disease but often the cardiovascular symptoms can be difficult to unravel due to low physical activity in this patient group and thereby low strain on the heart. On the other hand, cardiomyopathy or cardiac arrhythmogenic disease may be the first sign of an underlying neuromuscular disorder. Indeed, of the more than 40 genes that h...

Muscular dystrophy is a general term encompassing muscle disorders that cause weakness and wasting, typically leading to premature death. Membrane instability, as a result of a genetic disruption within the dystrophin-glycoprotein complex (DGC), is thought to induce myofiber degeneration, although the downstream mechanism whereby membrane fragility leads to disease remains controversial. One po...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive genetic disease with no cure at present. Children suffering from this disease eventually become wheelchair bound and die in their late teens. Paediatricians caring for the child with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy in resource poor settings face a lot challenges. These challenges include: poverty, inadequate multidisciplinary care, emotional burn-out of ...