The symptoms and signs of muscle disease are considered in this chapter mainly in connection with the age of the patient at the time of onset, their mode of evolution, and the presence or absence of familial occurrence. Because many muscle diseases are hereditary, a careful family history is important. The pattern of inheritance has diagnostic significance and, if genetic counseling or prenatal diagnosis is a consideration, a detailed genealogic tree becomes essential. When historical data are insufficient, it is often necessary to examine siblings and parents of the proband. The molecular genetics and other genetic aspects of the heritable muscle diseases, subjects of intense interest in recent years, are discussed at appropriate points in the chapter.
In summary, the clinical recognition of myopathic diseases is facilitated by a prior knowledge of a few topographic syndromes, the age of the patient at the onset of the illness, a familial occurrence of the same or similar illnesses, and of the medical setting in which weakness evolves. Diagnostic accuracy is aided by the intelligent use of the laboratory examinations discussed in Chap. 2, particularly the muscle enzymes, EMG, and muscle biopsy.
The discovery that striated skeletal muscle and that cardiac muscle could be the sole targets of a number of infectious agents came about during the era of the development of microbiology and occupied the attention of many prominent clinicians, including Osler. As these diseases were being characterized, however, a number of other inflammatory states affecting muscle were found for which there was no infectious cause. Later, an autoimmune mechanism was postulated, but even today this is not securely established. This group of idiopathic inflammatory myopathies figures so prominently in clinical myology that we devote a separate section to the subject. First, the infections of muscle are described.
Included here are trichinosis, toxoplasmosis, parasitic and fungal infections, and a number of viral infections. The related but unclassifiable entity of sarcoid myopathy is addressed in a latter section of this chapter under “Sarcoid Myopathy, Granulomatous Myositis, and Localized Nodular Myositis.”
This parasitic disease is caused by the nematode
Trichinella spiralis. Its general features are discussed in Chap. 31. Regarding the myopathic aspect of the illness, the authors have been most impressed with the ocular muscle weakness, which results in strabismus and diplopia; with weakness of the tongue, resulting in dysarthria; and with weakness of the masseter and pharyngeal muscles, which interferes with chewing and swallowing. Any weakness of limb muscles is usually mild and more severe proximally than distally. However, the diaphragm may be involved, as well as the myocardium. The affected muscles are slightly swollen and tender in the acute stage of the disease. Often, there is conjunctival, orbital, and facial edema, sometimes accompanied by subconjunctival and subungual splinter hemorrhages. As the trichinae become encysted over a period of a few weeks, the symptoms subside and recovery is complete. Many, perhaps the majority, of infected patients are asymptomatic throughout the invasive period, and as much as 1 to 3 percent of the population in certain regions of the country will be found at autopsy to have calcified trichinella cysts in their muscles with no history of parasitic illness. Heavy infestations have been known to end fatally, usually from cardiac and diaphragmatic involvement. In these more massive infections, the brain also may be involved, probably by emboli that arise in the heart from an associated myocarditis.