Clinical treatments of muscular diseases differ from case to case which includes medication testing that works on alleviating the diseases' symptoms. Myopathies' treatment relies on upon its cause (Gupta, 2014). The objectives of myopathy treatment are to abate the development of the disease and alleviate symptoms. Muscular and inflammatory dystrophies' treatments range from treatments using drugs to bypassing circumstances which makes muscles make a lot of effort for metabolic myopathies. Doctors often advise myopathy patients to lose weight and keep it low; as a lighter body needs less effort from the muscles. Also they advise them to abstain from making the muscles to fatigue. At the point when breathing issues appear, some patients use …show more content…
Idiopathic myopathies have three main types: dermatomyositis (DM), polymyositis (PM), and inclusion body myositis (IBM) (Anthony, 2003). The treatments of idiopathic myopathies involve three stages, where each stage is given to the patient based on his/her responsiveness to the less powerful stage. The first stage involves patients administered with corticosteroids. High doses of a specific corticosteroid, prednisone, have shown in previous studies to have an impact on the spread of the disease as well as enhancing the function and strength of the muscles. Unfortunately, inclusion body myositis is not commonly receptive to prednisone or other immunosuppressive or immune-modulating treatments. The only effect of prednisone on IBM was the decrease of serum creatine kinase levels. When patients are exposed to corticosteroids in a long period of time, they may suffer from weakness caused by the high levels of steroids taken for a long period of time, resulting in type-II muscle fiber atrophy. Thus, corticosteroids should be administered with lowest possible dosage in order to avoid muscle atrophy (Anthony, …show more content…
These second-stage medications include: azathioprine, methotrexate, intravenous immunoglobulin, or mycophenolate. The second-stage agents are added to prednisone, and not given to patients on their own. Azathioprine has shown to be less efficient than methotrexate in males, and patients that haven’t improved with prednisone. Unfortunately, methotrexate has side effects including alopecia, blockage of bone marrow, toxicity in kidneys and liver, and pulmonary fibrosis. Azathioprine and IBM has shown to be effective in patients with DM and PM. However, azathioprine has shown to be more effective with patients that were responsive to prednisone than non-responsive patients. One disadvantage of azathioprine is that it takes around 6 months for it to be efficiently useful. Moreover, IBM is usually given to patients first before the other two second-stage agents, as it functions quicker than them (Anthony,