Symptoms of Myasthenia Gravis

I don’t know if you have ever encountered such or similar situations in your life. Sometimes when you are doing something or just sitting idle, you suddenly find that your hands or feet have lost their function and you can’t use any strength at all. This condition may be caused by a temporary disorder of the body's muscles, but when a person experiences this condition frequently, it may be a manifestation of myasthenia gravis.

When it comes to myasthenia gravis, everyone should be able to imagine that, first of all, this is definitely a disease related to human muscles, that's right. Myasthenia gravis is actually an immune disease caused by muscle transmission dysfunction. Below is a detailed introduction to the symptoms of myasthenia gravis.

The main clinical manifestations of myasthenia gravis are partial or systemic skeletal muscle weakness and fatigue. The symptoms worsen after activity and are relieved after rest. The prevalence is 77-150/1 million, and the annual incidence is 4-11/1 million. The incidence rate in females is higher than that in males, about 3:2. The disease occurs in all age groups, and most of the cases are children aged 1 to 5 years old.

The causes of myasthenia gravis are divided into two categories. One is congenital hereditary, which is extremely rare and has nothing to do with autoimmunity; the second is autoimmune disease, which is the most common. The cause of the disease is still unclear, but it is generally believed to be related to infection, drugs, and environmental factors. At the same time, 65% to 80% of myasthenia gravis patients have thymic hyperplasia, and 10% to 20% have concomitant thymoma.

In the early stages of myasthenia gravis, patients often feel soreness or discomfort in the eyes or limbs, or blurred vision, and are easily fatigued. Fatigue is aggravated by hot weather or menstruation. As the disease progresses, skeletal muscles become noticeably tired and weak. A notable feature is that muscle weakness worsens in the afternoon or evening after exertion and improves in the morning or after resting. This phenomenon is called "lighter in the morning, heavier in the evening."

Myasthenia gravis patients can affect skeletal muscles throughout the body and may have the following symptoms:

(1) Drooping eyelids, blurred vision, diplopia, strabismus, and inflexible eye movement.

(2) Expression is indifferent, with a wry smile on the face, lisp, difficulty in articulation, and often accompanied by nasal voice.

(3) Weakness in chewing, coughing when drinking water, and difficulty swallowing.

(4) Weak neck, difficulty raising the head, and inability to turn the neck or shrug the shoulders.

(5) Difficulty raising arms, combing hair, climbing stairs, squatting, and getting into a car.

There is currently no special medical method to treat myasthenia gravis that can cure it immediately. The current treatment methods mainly include drug therapy and thymectomy. However, when conducting drug treatment, single drug treatment cannot be used for a long time, because this will only treat the symptoms and not the root cause, and may also cause the disease to worsen. Most myasthenia gravis patients suffer from thymus abnormalities, so thymectomy is a relatively effective treatment for myasthenia gravis.