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Muscle atrophy can be understood as a condition where your muscles start wasting away. This usually happens if you keep your body immobile for a long time. This condition is especially prevalent in people who are bedridden because of any issues or aging.
In this article, we will discuss the symptoms and causes of these conditions along with the possible treatment and diagnosis.
What Is Muscle Atrophy?
Muscle atrophy can be understood as a condition where your muscles start getting wasted away. This condition is most likely the cause of the lack of physical activity in the body.
Sometimes, when a serious injury or disease makes it difficult for you to move your leg or arm, which results in a lack of mobility. This lack of mobility in turn causes muscle waste. Over a period of time, you might feel that your legs or arms are appearing smaller without getting shorter.
The main causes of muscle atrophy tend to be inactivity and immobility of the body. However, proper care in terms of nutrition and exercise can help in improving your condition. This condition can also happen in people who are bedridden or those who are not able to move any one of their limbs because of any injury.
Other causes of the condition include aging, burns, injuries, alcohol-associated myopathy, malnutrition, stroke, peripheral nerve injuries, corticosteroid therapy, and more. There are also several medical conditions that cause the muscles in your body to waste away, including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, dermatomyositis, muscular dystrophy, osteoarthritis, spinal muscular atrophy, and more.
In some situations, this condition can be reversed through proper physical therapy along with an exercise and diet routine.
Muscle Atrophy Symptoms
Symptoms of this condition include:
- If you feel that one of your limbs is noticeably smaller than the other.
- If you are experiencing increased weakness in any of your limbs.
- If you have been leading a physically sedentary lifestyle for a very long time.
If you feel any such symptoms in your body, then you should immediately schedule a medical examination or if you are not able to move your limbs properly. Because in this case, there is a good probability that you are undiagnosed with muscle wasting.
Signs of Muscle Atrophy in Hands
Signs of this condition tend to vary from individual to individual. However, common signs of muscle atrophy in your hands include tingling in your hands, decreasing muscle mass in your hands, one hand appearing smaller than the other, and numbness in your hands.
Muscle Atrophy in Legs
Muscle waste or atrophy in the legs can be a result of the immobility of your lower body for a prolonged period of time. Signs of muscle wasting in your legs include tingling or numbness in your legs, feeling of weakness in any one of your legs, one leg being smaller than the other, trouble walking, difficulty in balancing, and more. Other general signs of muscle waste include gradual memory loss and facial weakness.
Spinal Muscular Atrophy
Spinal muscular atrophy can be understood as a genetic disorder which is more than often characterized by the waste and weakness of your skeletal muscles that are used for movements. This is usually caused due to the loss of the motor neurons, which are responsible for controlling the muscle movement in the body. This disease affects voluntary muscle movement, central nervous system, and peripheral nervous system.
Muscle atrophy or wasting is generally caused if you are unable to move your body regularly due to any injury or underlying health conditions. The muscle wasting can be diagnosed by the doctor through different methods including MRI, CT scan, EMG, X-rays, blood tests, biopsy, and more.
This condition can be reversed through proper nutrition and regular exercise. Common treatments that are undertaken for this condition include physical therapy, surgery, and ultrasound therapy.
