Normal and Aberrant Muscle Tissue Healing, Learning from Health and Disease

Abstract

Human skeletal muscle exhibits remarkable plasticity, being responsive to chemical, mechanical, metabolic, and inflammatory stress. When the homeostatic disturbance is below a threshold of significant damage, the muscle responds by modifying metabolic activity, cell size/shape, and structure, thereby normalizing cellular function. If the disturbance causes significant damage, skeletal muscle, along with a precisely choreographed response from the immune system, can regenerate. Very few pathological conditions inhibit these adaptive responses in muscle. Yet, from these few conditions, we can learn a great deal. Working with the immune system, normal muscle healing can inform disease treatments, and the disease pathology informs our understanding of normal muscle healing. Here we use Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) as a model of failed muscle adaptation/regeneration to attempt to understand normal muscle healing, why it sometimes fails, and how normal muscle response might be applied to understand and treat DMD.