Antibodies against this recombinant protein detected a large protein that exactly co-migrates with dystrophin yet is detectable in patients suffering from Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies.
We studied dystrophin in three young girls with a sporadic myopathy of early onset, manifested by mild to severe limb weakness, calf hypertrophy, high serum creatine kinase, normal karyotype, and morphologic features in muscle consistent with muscular dystrophy.
This study emphasizes the clinical overlap between limb-girdle muscular dystrophy and dystrophinopathies, and reinforces the necessity of dystrophin protein and gene studies for the accurate clinical diagnosis of isolated cases of muscular dystrophy.
We studied 38 unrelated patients from southern France with Duchenne (DMD) or Becker (BMD) muscular dystrophy for intragenic deletions of the DMD/BMD gene.
In this study, we have taken advantage of this phenomenon, called illegitimate transcription, to analyze the muscle-type dystrophin mRNA in easily accessible cells such as lymphoid cells, fibroblasts, and peripheral blood cells from Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies with known internal gene deletion.
These results show that secondary changes in the expression of dystrophin can occur in the absence of an abnormality in the corresponding gene and that dystrophincannot be used in isolation as a diagnostic marker for muscular dystrophy.
In this brief review, we describe the clinical manifestations of Duchenne's muscular dystrophy (DMD) and other similar syndromes, outline the history of the dystrophin gene's identification and its relationship to these muscular dystrophies, and relate the importance of the gene's discovery to clinical neurology.We do not discuss treatment.
These cases demonstrate that autosomal dominant muscular dystrophy may present in childhood, and that dystrophin and molecular genetic analyses should be performed when considering the diagnosis of childhood muscular dystrophy, even in the presence of a classical phenotype.
Clinical evidence is presented supporting the hypothesis that the metabolic abnormality in the dystrophin-defective muscular dystrophies (DMD and BMD) involves the ATP pathway.
The central portion of the dystrophin gene locus is a preferential site for deletions causing progressive muscular dystrophy of the Duchenne type (DMD).