Why are my calf muscles stiff and weak?

Babies between three and five years old should be very mobile and able to run around. If your baby's calves look "strong", but his athletic ability lags far behind that of babies of the same age, some children have strong calves but have no strength and cannot stand up. What is the reason for this? Experts say that if children's calves are thick but weak, they need to rule out genetic diseases.

Zhang Cheng, chief physician of the Department of Neurology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, introduced that Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a recessive genetic disease caused by gene mutation, with an incidence rate of 1/3500, almost all of which occur in boys.

This mutated gene is related to the anti-muscular atrophy protein. Children with this disease will experience progressive muscular atrophy. If no intervention is given, children will generally be unable to walk by the age of 12 and will find it difficult to live beyond the age of 30. They often die of respiratory or heart failure.

These children begin to develop the disease in the neonatal and infant stages, but the symptoms are mild and difficult to detect, with the only manifestation being that they speak and walk slightly later than normal infants and young children. Most of those who are detected and diagnosed within one year of age are discovered during hospitalization or physical examination for other diseases such as pneumonia.

Most children with the disease are diagnosed between the ages of three and five, and they lag significantly behind children of the same age in running, jumping, climbing stairs, squatting, and standing up. Taking the stairs as an example, when children go up the stairs, they often go up one foot first and then the other foot on the same step, instead of going up the stairs step by step. At the same time, their calf gastrocnemius muscles are enlarged, which we usually call "carrot legs". They look thick and strong, but they are big and weak.

There is currently no specific drug for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. It is mainly treated with medication, exercise rehabilitation and symptomatic treatment, which can slow the progression of the disease and improve the quality of life. The latest progress is stem cell transplantation and gene drugs (which have been launched overseas, but are still new in China).

The medical institution where Zhang Cheng works has been conducting clinical research on stem cell transplantation for Duchenne muscular dystrophy for many years. More than a dozen children have received transplants. Long-term observation has shown that stem cell transplantation has greatly helped improve the children's motor function and cardiopulmonary function.

If you have a baby who meets the above description, it is recommended that your family take him to a neurology department as soon as possible to rule out whether he has pseudohypertrophic muscular dystrophy. If the child does have pseudohypertrophic muscular dystrophy, it is recommended that he or she cooperate with the doctor's treatment. During the treatment process, multidisciplinary treatment is recommended, with neurologists as the main focus. The patient's physical condition should be checked every six months and the treatment should be evaluated.