Dermatomyositis
An inflammatory muscle disease with progressive weakness and a characteristic rash, sometimes involving the lungs.
Is this what you are experiencing?
Inflammatory muscle disease causes weakness rather than pain — difficulty climbing stairs, rising from a chair, or lifting the arms overhead. Because it affects the muscles closest to the trunk first and progresses over weeks to months, it is often put down to age or deconditioning until muscle enzymes are checked.
What symptoms should prompt an assessment?
You do not need to have every symptom below — and having one does not mean you have a particular disease. These are the patterns that commonly lead to a rheumatology consultation:
- Difficulty climbing stairs, walking uphill or getting up from a chair or the floor.
- Difficulty lifting the arms, combing hair, reaching overhead or carrying objects.
- Progressive, often symmetrical weakness affecting everyday activities.
- Muscle pain, tenderness, cramps or marked fatigue occurring with weakness.
- A new or unusual rash occurring with muscle weakness.
- Swallowing difficulty, choking, voice change or neck weakness when clinically relevant.
- Abnormal muscle enzyme reports or muscle test results.
- Dry cough, breathlessness or reduced exercise tolerance occurring alongside inflammatory muscle symptoms.
Which conditions does this cover?
Polymyositis
Inflammation of the muscles causing gradually progressive, usually symmetrical weakness of the shoulders and hips.
Immune-Mediated Necrotizing Myopathy (IMNM)
A form of autoimmune muscle disease with marked weakness and highly elevated muscle enzymes, requiring specialist treatment.
How is it diagnosed and treated?
Dr. Ashish Baweja combines a detailed clinical assessment with targeted investigations — blood tests and inflammatory markers, imaging, and where relevant procedures such as joint aspiration, nail fold capillaroscopy or biopsy — to reach an accurate diagnosis. Treatment plans follow current international (EULAR/ACR) guidelines and are personalised to your condition, lifestyle and goals, with an emphasis on achieving long-term remission and protecting quality of life.
Common questions
Is the weakness of myositis the same as feeling tired?
No. Tiredness is a lack of energy; myositis causes a real loss of strength in the muscles closest to the trunk — shoulders, upper arms, hips and thighs. People notice they cannot climb stairs, get up from a low chair or lift their arms to comb their hair, and the difficulty grows over weeks to months.
Which blood test is checked first?
Creatine kinase (CK), a muscle enzyme, is the simplest first test and is usually raised in inflammatory myositis. Hard exercise and some medicines, including statins, can raise it too, so the result is read alongside the history. Antibody tests, an MRI of the thigh muscles and sometimes a muscle biopsy follow.
Why are the lungs checked when the problem is muscle weakness?
Lung involvement is common in inflammatory myositis and can be present without any breathlessness, so lung function tests and a chest scan are part of the assessment at diagnosis.
This page is general information to help guide a consultation. It is not a diagnosis.
Book your consultation
Consult Dr. Ashish Baweja at Artemis Hospitals, Sector 51, Gurugram, Haryana 122018.