Background: Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rare and severe X-linked muscular dystrophy in which the standard of care with variable outcome, also due to different drug response, is chronic off-label treatment with corticosteroids (CS). In order to search for SNP biomarkers for corticosteroid responsiveness, we genotyped variants across 205 DMD-related genes in patients with differential response to steroid treatment.
Methods And Findings: We enrolled a total of 228 DMD patients with identified dystrophin mutations, 78 of these patients have been under corticosteroid treatment for at least 5 years.