Abstract
When young rabbits are placed upon muscle-dystrophy producing Diet 11, the majority die within a period of several months. 1 Rarely the disease runs a protracted course; the animals may survive for a year, only to succumb eventually with characteristic degeneration of the skeletal muscles. One such adult dystrophic rabbit successfully completed gestation and gave birth to living young. This exceptional event, has permitted us to observe that nutritional muscular dystrophy may be passed on from mother to offspring.
Rabbit 241 was born in the laboratory on Jan. 15, 1935. On Feb. 19th, it was weaned and given Diet 11.∗ A biopsy from the thigh muscles was taken on Jan. 6th, 1936, when the animal had attained a weight of 2.4 kilos. A few necrotic fibers were found in each low power field. The muscle creatin was 540 mg.—within the normal range. Two subsequent biopsies on Nov. 19th and Dec. 11th showed little progression of the lesions.
On Jan. 7th, 1936, she was mated with a stock breeding male, which was known to have sired several normal litters, and which had been maintained on a stock diet of grains and alfalfa. On Feb. 8th, Rabbit 241 gave birth to a litter of 2. The young seemed somewhat scrawny, but they were not carefully examined for fear of disturbing the mother. The following morning, the newborn rabbits were found dead.
Their skeletal muscles at autopsy were strikingly pale. No other pathological change was recorded.
Histologically, sections taken from various muscles all showed extreme lesions (Fig. 1). Many of the fibers—in some field almost 50%—were undergoing hyaline necrosis, with segmentation and rupture. They were widely separated by an œdematous stroma in which were great numbers of elongate fusiform cells with vesicular nuclei and basophilic cytoplasm.
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