Studies of healthy relatives of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy

Further Studies Concerning the Detection of Carriership in the Duchenne Type of Dystrophy

“…A postexertion increase was obtained only in carriers who already exhibited high CPK activity at rest [9,17].…”

“…The equipment and methods of electromyographic, electrocardiographic and biochemical investigations have been described in the previous paper [17].…”

“…In the present study determinations of aldolase, lactic dehydrogenase and citric acid were omitted as being nonspecific for carrier identification [16,17].…”

“…In previous papers [16,17] the authors have reported the results of complex examinations of female relatives of boys suffering from the Duchenne type of progressive muscular dystrophy. Since then, some papers have appeared stressing the importance of correlating other tests, especially electromyography, with the biochemical ones [12,13,14,30], so it was decided to investigate the following questions on more exten sive material.…”

Quantitative electromyography: a new analogue technique for detecting changes in action potential duration

“…One of the parameters which has been found particularly useful, especially in detecting carriers of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, is the duration of the action potentials which make up the waveform. These durations have been measured manually (Buchthal, 1957;Bosch, 1963;Davey and Woolf, 1964;Hausmanowa -Petrusewicz, Prot, Niebroj -Dobosz, Emeryk, Slucka, Hetnarska, Bendarzewska, and Pucek, 1965;Gardner-Medwin, 1968), and also automatically by detecting the zero crossings or turning points of the signal (Rose and Willison, 1967). However, the manual measurements are extremely time consuming, and the automatic methods are expensive in terms of equipment and can give misleading results, since small noise deflections from the baseline cannot always be distinguished from the action potentials.…”