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Rare Disease DiscussionsAuthor: Peter Ciszewski, CheckRare
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Spinal Muscular Atrophy: The Changing Definition of Success. An Expert Panel on the Evolution of SMA Care.
Wednesday, 1 July, 2026
Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past decade. Drs. Nancy Kuntz, Alicia Henriquez, and Angela Lek discuss how advances in disease-modifying therapies have fundamentally changed the outlook for children living with SMA, leading clinicians to rethink what constitutes a successful outcome in SMA care.Over the past decade, the management and treatment of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) have been transformed, resulting in remarkable effects on young patients’ neuromuscular function status, mobility, and quality of life. These improvements would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago and challenge clinicians, researchers, patients, and families to rethink what is defined as a successful outcome in SMA care. According to Nancy Kuntz, MD, a child neuromuscular specialist from Lurie Children’s Hospital, Chicago, when before the use of newborn screening and the latest treatments, the main outcome of interest was prolonged patient survival. Today, achievable patient outcomes include sitting upright, and walking independently. This is a long way from the palliative view of SMA care. The use of standard measurement scales of patient outcomes need to keep up with evolving expectations of caregivers and patients.This will require objective data, like biomarkers, x-ray changes, and the ability to see significant changes in motor scale scores, focused on types of motor function that is important to patients.Alicia Henriquez, MD, a pediatric neuromuscular specialist from Seattle Children’s Hospital, pointed to one of the standard functional scales used in therapeutic clinical trials, the Hammersmith Functional Motor Scale Expanded (HFMSE). It is based on 33 distinct functional domains, but not all of those domains are of equal importance to patients and caregivers. And a change in HFMSE scale measurement may not be statistically significant for the purposes of clinical trials, but that incremental change in one domain may be highly important for the individual. The scales do a better job of detecting major changes in function but not what those changes mean for patients.The Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) is helping to bring more light to this issue. Angela Lek, PhD, Chief Research Officer at the Association, described how MDA is sponsoring registry studies to collect real-world outcomes of individuals with SMA. This may result in patient-reported measures that may more-directly reflect improvements that patients believe are important.For more information on SMA visit https://checkrare.com/spinal-muscular-atrophy-a-decade-of-progress/
