Expression of myostatin gene mRNA in the muscle tissue from 75 patients with muscular weakness / 中华神经科杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate myostatin gene mRNA expression in the muscle tissue from patients with muscle weakness suffering from different illness.Methods The clinical data of our patients were all from the Muscular Disease Center,Department of Neurology,People' s Liberation Army General Hospital.A total of 75 patients suffered from muscular weakness were included consecutively.Skeletal muscle biopsies were obtained with informed consent from all 75 patients.The diagnosis was confirmed by two senior doctors for muscular disease according to the clinical feature,the results of electromyography,serum creatine kinase activity and histopathological examination.Among of them,21 cases were diagnosed as polymyositis,15 cases progressive muscular dystrophy,5 cases neurogenic amyotrophy,4 cases chronic muscle fiber damage,4 cases mitochondrial myopathy,4 cases lipid storage myopathy,4 cases myotonic dystrophy,3 cases muscular dystrophy in adults,2 cases dermatomyositis,and 2 cases inclusion body myositis.There were 2 cases characterized by pure high activity of creatine kinase.And the other 9 cases were diagnosed as non-neuromuscular disease.The expression of myostatin gene mRNA in muscle tissue was evaluated by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction method,with glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase as internal reference.Results The expression of myostatin gene mRNA was detected in 63 patients,but not in other 12 cases,and the percentage of positive expression was 84％.The expression index was with great variation,from 0 to 3.52.In positive cohort,the index was correlated positively with the duration of disease (r =0.236,P =0.041).The activities of creatine kinase in positive expression cohort were higher than that of negative one,but nonsignificantly.Conclusion The expression of myostatin gene mRNA in muscle tissue may not correlate to the entity of atrophic muscular disease because of its great variation.