Psychological approach in managing muscular dystrophy patients in Malaysia

Abstract

Muscular dystrophy is a hereditary and progressive degenerative disorder affecting skeletal muscles, and often-other organ systems. The real bur-den of muscular dystrophy in Malaysia is difficult to estimate, since the epidemiological data for each of muscular dystrophies and even for muscu-lar dystrophies in collective are not available. There are not many researches focusing on mus-cular dystrophy in Malaysia. The few available re-searches related to muscular dystrophy in Malaysia are mostly revolving around the medical and ge-netic science aspects of it, not in the psychology and social sides of the disease. There is no official definition for rare diseases in Malaysia. Nonethe-less, the unofficial working definition for rare dis-eases in Malaysia is that the rare diseases are dis-eases, which affect less than one in 4000 people in the population. About 3% of babies will have some serious birth defect worldwide while in Ma-laysia, there are around 600,000 births every year and therefore, there would be about 18,000 babies will be born with birth defects every year.