Researchers at five U.S. and one Canadian center are conducting a clinical trial of the medications coenzyme Q10 and lisinopril to determine their possible beneficial effects on heart function in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD) and five forms of limb-girdle muscular dystrophy (LGMD).

A team headed by neurologist Jerry Mendell, a longtime MDA research grantee and director of the MDA Clinic at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, has received the prestigious Annals of Neurology prize for an outstanding contribution to clinical neuroscience.

When Vance Taylor was a boy, he didn’t know any adult he could look to and say, “There’s somebody like me.”

His mother, Morena Noyes, recalls the first time she took Vance and his sister Kathy — both of whom have limb-girdle muscular dystrophy— to MDA summer camp.

“We were still in the parking lot, in our Astro van,” Noyes says. “Vance looked, and then he turned to his sister and said, ‘Kathy, there are people like you and me here!’ He was just beaming.”

Stem cells have been much in the news lately, including for neuromuscular diseases.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association has awarded 40 research grants totaling $13.7 million to advance the understanding of disease processes and uncover new strategies for treatments and cures of muscular dystrophy and the more than 40 other diseases in the Association's program.

The new grants were recommended by MDA's Scientific and Medical Advisory Committees and approved by MDA's Board of Directors at its July 2011 meeting.