Muscular Weakness and Respiratory Function

THE inspiratory muscles are the only skeletal muscles vital to life, and the commonest threat to life in neuromuscular disorders is respiratory failure. Therefore, in patients with neuromuscular disorders leading to weakness, it is critically important to determine whether the disease is affecting the respiratory muscles. This is so obvious that it hardly seems worth mentioning, but it appears to be a difficult message to get across. This is particularly frustrating since assessing respiratory-muscle function is quick, cheap, reliable, and easy, and can be done at the bedside. It provides information that is both diagnostic and prognostic, has major therapeutic . . .