Help! What is muscular dystrophy ?

I need to understand what muscular dystrophy is. I read about it on line but I need someone to break it down in words an idiot can understand. Thanks in advance for anyone trying to help me.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association treats 40 different diseases. Muscular Dystrophy as a disease comes in two variations Becker, which is the milder form, and Duchene, which is more aggressive. In people with Muscular Dystrophy the body makes to little or none of a protein (dystrophin), which helps muscles to keep their strength and shape. In Becker the body does not produce enough, in Duchene the body produces none. My son has Duchene when I got his diagnosis I ran home and looked up all I could find and was devastated. What you read is usually the worse case and I found it varies greatly some people plateau for years at certain stages and some do not. I will tell you how my son progressed but everyone is different. At 8 he was diagnosed he could not run, took stairs one step at a time and when he got up from the floor he did what the doctor called a crab motion spreading his arms and legs out and inching his way up. The first muscle the disease attacks is the leg muscles, it moves from the larger muscles that do most of the work to the next smaller set of muscles. He was in a wheelchair at age 10 and he also needed surgery to release his heel cords (In kids with MD the heal cords start to shorten and there feet start to point down). Then it started affecting his arms at age 13 which made him have to go into an electric wheelchair. He developed scoliosis and had to have a spinal fusion and to Herrington rods put along his spine, which meant he could not longer turn in bed by himself. He then plateau and was losing just a little arm strength so he needed a little more help. He is know 23 and the next stage hit this last summer it moved to the diaphragm muscle with effects his ability to exhale air and push CO2 out of the lungs he had a build up of CO2 and his Oxygen went down and he went into a seizure and we almost loss him he is now on oxygen during the day and a ventilator at night to let his heart rest and to get a good nights rest. The diaphragm will slowly get weaker and he will need to be on the ventilator all the time and lastly the next muscles the disease attacks is the heart muscle. The only thing I can add is my son has showed me the definition of what courage is.

Muscular Dystrophy is a series of diseases which damage the muscular system of the body. There are about 100 or more different kinds of it. Many are very serious even deadly some are not as damaging.

Great strides have been made against this disease and the life expectancy of people with it has been growing for the last century. This is a result of the Jerry Lewis Telethon on labor day. He has raised millions upon millions for research.

If you know a child with muscular dystrophy contact the muscular dystrophy association.

www. mdausa.org