Using General Anesthesia plus Muscle Relaxant in a Patient with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type IV: A Case Report

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.