Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is the most common form of muscular dystrophy, typically affecting males in infancy. The disease causes progressive weakness and atrophy of skeletal muscles, with approximately 20,000 new cases diagnosed yearly. Currently, methods for diagnosing DMD are invasive, laborious, and unable to make accurate early detections. While there is no cure for DMD, there are limited treatments available for managing symptoms. As such, there is a crucial unmet need to develop a simple and non-invasive method for accurately detecting DMD as early as possible. Raman spectroscopy with chemometric analysis is shown to have the potential to fill this diagnostic need.
Keywords: Duchenne muscular dystrophy; Raman spectroscopy; chemometrics; early diagnosis; skeletal muscle.