Myotonic diseases since Asmus Julius Thomas Thomsen (1815–1896) and Peter Emil Becker (1908–2000)

Abstract

Julius Thomsen first published his account of myotonia (an unusual muscle stiffness disorder) in himself and his family in 1876. By November 1971, Peter Becker was already famous for his eponymous Becker muscular dystrophy when he came to the Second International Congress on Muscle Diseases, in Perth. There, he presented an extensive study of myotonia, recognising a recessively inherited disease (now known as Becker’s recessive generalised myotonia), distinct from Thomsen’s myotonia congenita and clearly distinguishable from Steinert’s myotonic dystrophy, both dominantly inherited. Peter Becker, Shirley Bryant, Reinhardt Rüdel and Allan Bretag all met in Perth, with mutual interests in myotonia. They subsequently maintained contact while Bretag undertook research in Germany in 1972–1973 and 1977. Later, in 1978, Bretag worked with Bryant’s myotonic goats in Cincinnati. His research on Thomsen’s and Becker’s myotonias has since progressed to confirmation of Bryant’s chloride hypothesis through a molecular genetic study of the muscle chloride channel, CLC -1. This has culminated in several collaborative papers with German colleagues and, finally, in a mechanistic description of how the CLC -1 channel is gated.