DALLAS—Delayed diagnosis leads to earlier ambulation loss in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), according to study results presented at the 2025 Muscular Dystrophy Association Clinical & Scientific Conference.
“For every 2-year increase in the age at diagnosis, the odds of loss of ambulation increased by 2.6,” wrote Benjamin Tan and study coauthors from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.
Later DMD diagnosis delays intervention with multidisciplinary care and corticosteroid treatment. In this study, researchers investigated whether delayed diagnosis is also associated with earlier ambulation loss by reviewing the medical records of 78 boys with DMD followed at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
Among the patients, 40 were ambulatory and 38 were nonambulatory, meaning they could not walk independently. Two-thirds were identified as white non-Hispanic, 19.2% as Hispanic, 5.1% as Black non-Hispanic, 2.6% as Asian or Pacific Islander and 6.4% as another or unknown race.
Read more about DMD testing and diagnosis
The boys were an average of 3.2 years old when they started experiencing symptoms and 4.6 years old when diagnosed with DMD. For patients who were ambulatory, the average age at diagnosis was 3.6 years. For those who were nonambulatory, the average age at diagnosis was 5.6 years, according to the abstract.
Multidisciplinary care began when patients were 4.8 years old, on average.
Older age at diagnosis and white race were significantly associated with loss of ambulation, researchers reported. In addition to finding more than doubled odds for ambulation loss with every 2-year increase in age at diagnosis, odds for ambulation loss were 3.8 times higher for patients who were white non-Hispanic compared with patients who were non-white or Hispanic, analysis showed.
The research team said more studies are needed to investigate diagnostic timing and ambulation loss in larger groups of patients.
