Myopathy is the main adverse effect of the widely prescribed statin drug class. Statins exert their beneficial effect by inhibiting HMG CoA-reductase, the rate-controlling enzyme of the mevalonate pathway. The mechanism of statin myopathy is yet to be resolved, and its treatment is insufficient. Through homozygosity mapping and whole exome sequencing, followed by functional analysis using confocal microscopy and biochemical and biophysical methods, we demonstrate that a distinct form of human limb girdle muscular disease is caused by a pathogenic homozygous loss-of-function missense mutation in HMG CoA reductase (HMGCR), encoding HMG CoA-reductase. We biochemically synthesized and purified mevalonolactone, never administered to human patients before, and establish the safety of its oral administration in mice. We then show that its oral administration is effective in treating a human patient with no significant adverse effects. Furthermore, we demonstrate that oral mevalonolactone resolved statin-induced myopathy in mice. We conclude that HMGCR mutation causes a late-onset severe progressive muscular disease, which shows similar features to statin-induced myopathy. Our findings indicate that mevalonolactone is effective both in the treatment of hereditary HMGCR myopathy and in a murine model of statin myopathy. Further large clinical trials are in place to enable the clinical use of mevalonolactone both in the rare orphan disease and in the more common statin myopathy.
Keywords: HMGCR; limb girdle muscular dystrophy; mutation; statins.