Key Finding In Rare Muscle Disease

[Guest guest]

Key Finding In Rare Muscle Disease

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=61009

The finding is in the current issue of ls of Neurology, a

leading international neurology journal, in work led by Professor

Nigel Laing and Dr Nowak of the Laboratory for Molecular

Genetics at the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research

(WAIMR) and done in collaboration with a number of European

researchers.

Professor Laing said his team had discovered a number of children

across Europe who, despite a complete absence of the crucial

skeletal muscle protein actin, were not totally paralysed at birth,

and managed to have some muscle movements.

" This intriguing finding led us to look deeper and what we saw is

that while these children do not have any skeletal actin in their

skeletal muscle, they have another form of the protein, known as

heart actin, in their skeletal muscles, " said Professor Laing.

" It appears the more heart actin they have in their skeletal

muscles, the more movement they have. "

Professor Laing said the finding was providing much excitement.

" Before we are born, we all have both skeletal muscle and heart

actin in our skeletal muscles, but around the time of birth, we

switch off the heart actin - and right now, it's a mystery why this

happens, " he said.

" We have long believed that if we could find out how to switch the

heart actin back on in the skeletal muscle we could use this to

create new treatments for these devastating muscle diseases.

" What's remarkable is that these children's bodies have performed

this 'switching on' process naturally, presumably to help counteract

their condition, and if we can tap into the science of how they've

managed to do that, we could perhaps use that information to help

other affected children. "

BACKGROUND

Children with these muscle diseases have no skeletal actin because

of recessive mutations in the skeletal actin gene which " knock out "

the gene function.

The fact that the mutations are recessive means that both the

unaffected parents of the patients are carriers of the disease.

Professor Laing's laboratory was the first to discover mutations in

the skeletal muscle actin gene which cause muscle diseases.