Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy eMedicine PMR

Description: The earliest descriptions of limb-girdle weakness are ascribed to Leyden1 and Möbius2 in 1876 and 1879, respectively. They described adult patients with a pelvic and femoral distribution of weakness and atrophy with a benign course. In 1884, Erb characterized a juvenile form of proximal muscle weakness.3 Erb's patient had only shoulder-girdle weakness and atrophy, with sparing of other muscles of the body and a benign disease course compared with that described by Duchenne in the 1860s. Duchenne, a French physician, initially described a condition of progressive lethal wasting of degenerative skeletal muscle, which was later referred to as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. At that time, the differentiation between the spinal muscular atrophies and weakness associated with central nervous system disorders and primary muscle disease had not been established.
Sahgal & Reger 2009