Spinal Muscular Atrophy: A Case Study

What is Spinal Muscular Atrophy?

Spinal Muscular Atrophy is a disease that can destroy the “lower motor neurons in the nerve cells” (Spinal Muscular Atrophy, 2015). Spinal Muscular Atrophy affects the spinal cord that controls our everyday movement. These cells send out processes in the peripheral nerve to eventually make contact to our muscle, legs, arms, chest, breathing muscles. SMA is a very rare disease but it is the second most common recessive disease after cystic fibrosis. It is a very serious condition that has become a common genetic cause of death in infancy. This disease can influence our movement of our muscle and the ability to weaken our control movement, in this case the signal from our spine eventually will be lost. Refer to Figure 1 for a better understanding. If our motor neurons weakens or dies, it no longer sends the signal to our muscle movement, therefore cutting off any trace of signal between the muscle and the brain.

Figure 1:

The motor neurons send a long process from the spinal cord to the muscle. Refer to Figure 2. The motor neurons then send the electrical impulse to the muscle, therefore allowing the muscle to contract. In order for a normal physical movement to happen, this process must be able to compromise for the movement to be able to happen. This could either be a simple as walking, standing, sitting or writing. Spinal muscular atrophy has the ability or the lack of ability to receive this impulse thus creating the problem of achieving the basic everyday activity. The phenotype of the spinal muscular atrophy can be categorized by the achievement between the small movements of basic activity, this can either be recognized from sitting down to standing up, or laying down to standing up, etc. This can help tell which feature of the spinal muscular atrophy an individual belongs to. There are 3 types of Spinal Muscular Atrophy, they are listed