McArdle's Disease in the 1980s

Abstract

Few physicians have better deserved to be remembered in eponym than Brian McArdle of Guy's Hospital. In 1951 he described a young man with a lifelong history of exertional muscle pain and stiffness¹ — symptoms that previous physicians had dismissed as hysterical. The patient's unusual localized cramps, evident during intense aerobic exercise, were greatly magnified by ischemic exercise and, unlike ordinary cramps, were electromyographically silent. McArdle recalled that electrically silent contraction (known as "rigor" or "contracture") occurs in vitro in muscle poisoned by iodoacetate, a substance that blocks anaerobic glycolysis and prevents the formation of lactic acid. Applying this laboratory . . .