In a new study, researchers have discovered a new muscle disease that involves sudden debilitating muscle pain and weakness.
This previously unknown autoimmune muscle disease has been identified by a team from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The team hopes the finding can help doctors treat patients appropriately because the syndrome could be easily mistaken for other muscle diseases that require different treatment.
In the study, they reported that they observed only four patients with the disease in more than 20 years.
In 1996, the team examined microscope slides of muscle from a patient with muscle pain and weakness.
They found scavenger cells that normally feed on dead material were crowded around injured muscle fibers.
Over the next 22 years, three more patients hospitalized for the same type of muscle pain and weakness.
By carefully analyzing the biopsies, the team discovered that the patients’ own muscles were under assault by immune scavenger cells known as histiocytes.
They named the newfound syndrome large-histiocyte-related immune myopathy.
The disease shows a new way in which the immune system can damage muscle cells. But understanding how muscle fibers are damaged by immune cells may lead to ways to prevent the damage.
The team says that the disease is quite rare and seems to be treatable. Three of the patients improved when treated with immunomodulating therapy such as steroids and have not relapsed since.
The fourth was undergoing cancer treatment when the muscle symptoms developed, and he died due to cancer shortly afterward.
The team suggests that people don’t need to be afraid this is going to happen to them.
Doctors need to recognize the immune nature of this condition in order to treat it appropriately. Therefore, in the extremely rare event that it does, doctors can have the tools to respond.
The senior author of the study is Alan Pestronk, MD, a professor of neurology, and of pathology and immunology.
The study is published in the journal Neurology.
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