Abstract
Biopsy was taken from the tibialis anterior muscle of patients of progressive muscular dystrophy (PMD), spinal progressive muscular atrophy, neural progressive muscular atrophy, spinal cord lesion and spastic paraplegia after compression of spinal cord in 18 cases in total.
Phosphorylase, succinic dehydrogenase, lactic dehydrogenase, cytochrome oxidase, adenosine triphosphatase were stained as well as H-E, PAS and cholinesterase for the motor end plate. Morphologically, the irregularity in diameter of muscle fibers was characteristic in the cases of PMD; majority of fibers were atrophied but some fibers were apparently enlarged. In two cases of neural progressive muscular atrophy, a group of small fibers was separated from another group of hypertrophic fibers. The size of end plate was found to be much reduced as far as 5 cases surveyed in PMD.
In general, the activity of phosphorylase in small fibers was found to be relatively decreased, while ATPase in small fibers was apt to be much increased. It was difficult to find out the relation between the size of fibers and enzymatic activity of succinic dehydrogenase as well as lactic dehydrogenase and/or cytochrome oxidase. In one case of neural progressive muscular atrophy, coarse network of sarcoplasma was found by staining succinic dehydrogenase which is accumulated at mitochondria. In spastic muscle, all of enzyme examined were found to be decreased.
