Using General Anesthesia plus Muscle Relaxant in a Patient with

Copyright © 2011 Xiu-Fen Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a rare genetic disease characterized by degeneration of spinal cord motor neurons, which results in hypotonia and muscle weakness. Patients with type IV SMA often have onset of weakness from adulthood. Anesthetic management is often difficult in these patients as a result of muscle weakness and hypersensitivity to neuromuscular blocking agents as shown by (Lunn and Wang; 2008, Simic; 2008, and Cifuentes-Diaz et al.; 2002). Herein we report a case of anesthetic management of a patient with SMA type IV for mammectomy and review some other cases of SMA patients receiving different kinds of anesthesia. 1. Case Report A 41-year-old woman (height 1.66m; weight 62 kg) with SMA type IVwas scheduled formammectomy. The diagnosis of SMA type IV was based on clinical progressive symptoms of limb muscular weakness that began eight years ago. She has been on wheelchair since five years ago. At present, she even could not lift her arms up but had no difficult