Myocardial Lesions in Strain 129 Dystrophic Mice

Abstract

SINCE the ætiopathology of muscular dystrophy is still unsettled, wide interest was provoked by the recent elaboration of a mouse strain afflicted with a hereditary myopathy resembling in many respects the human disease. This condition, referred to as dystrophia muscularis, arose as a mutation in a colony of inbred strain 129 mice and the inheritance of the disease has been shown to follow the pattern of an autosomal recessive gene¹. Although the symptomatology and pathology of dystrophia muscularis has been described in detail^1–4, occurrence of cardiac lesions has never been mentioned. Moreover, it was emphasized that the phenotypic effects of this mutation are restricted to skeletal muscular tissue⁵, in which the well-known and characteristic abnormalities progressively develop.