This work demonstrates that high levels of cardiac dystrophin restored by Pip peptide-AOs prevents further deterioration of cardiomyopathy and pathology following exercise in dystrophic DMD mice.
Thus current research efforts into the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms underlying these genetic diseases are not only directed towards studying skeletal muscle necrosis but also investigate abnormalities of heart and brain dystrophin-glycoprotein complexes in cardiomyopathy and brain deficiencies associated with muscular dystrophy.
We analyzed 78 BMD and X-linked dilated cardiomyopathy patients with common deletion mutations predicted to alter the dystrophin protein and correlated their mutations to cardiomyopathy age of onset.
We and others have shown that mosaic dystrophin expression at the wild-type level, depending on the percentage of dystrophin positive cardiomyocytes, can either delay the onset of or fully prevent cardiomyopathy in dystrophin-null mdx mice.
We identified a novel dystrophin mutation (p.1667 del Ala), resulting in BMD-associated cardiomyopathy that demonstrated the pathological features of significant fibrofatty replacement in the sub-epicardial layer of the ventricle; further, the high-throughput sequencing is helpful for making an early diagnosis of BMD.
We recently identified cleavage and functional impairment of dystrophin by the viral protease 2A during CVB3-infection as a molecular mechanism that may contribute to the pathogenesis of enterovirus-induced cardiomyopathy.
We report the first case of a DNA segment deletion encompassing promoters M and P of the human dystrophin gene, which caused a very severe muscle phenotype without cardiomyopathy, in a 13-year-old boy.
Young males presenting with apparent isolated cardiomyopathy or acute myocarditis may harbor dystrophin mutations without overt skeletal muscle pathology.