ABSTRACT There is scant information about the comprehensive distribution of dystrophic muscles in muscular dystrophy. Despite different clinical presentations of muscular dystrophy, a recent multi-center study concluded that phenotypic distribution of dystrophic muscles is independent of clinical phenotype and suggested that there is a common pattern of involved muscles. To evaluate this possibility, the present case report used cadaveric dissection to determine the whole-body distribution of fat-infiltrated, dystrophic muscles from a 72-year-old white male cadaver with adult-onset, late-stage muscular dystrophy. Severely dystrophic muscles occupied the pectoral, gluteal and pelvic regions, as well as the arm, thigh and posterior leg. In contrast, muscles of the head, neck, hands and feet largely appeared unaffected. Histopathology and a CT-scan supported these observations. This pattern of dystrophic muscles generally conformed with that described in the multi-center study, and provides prognostic insight for patients and the physicians treating them.

Climate data recorded by national meteorological agencies is either incomplete or faulty for some periods due to a number of reasons. Multi-functional utilization of climate data in complete form necessitates the filling of these gaps. In this study an inverse distance weighting (IDW) method was used to estimate rainfall utilizing neighbouring station data in the Free State Province of South Africa. Six weather stations evenly distributed across the province, and with data for 1950 to 2008, were used to evaluate this patching IDW approach at daily and dekadal time steps. Coefficient of determination (r²), mean absolute error (MAE) and mean bias error (MBE) were the statistics used in the assessment. Firstly, the study conducted a sensitivity analysis of the IDW exponent (p) which showed that the best results are obtained when p is either 2 or 2.5. The estimated values at all six stations were highly correlated with the measured rainfall data with an overall r² value exceeding 0.70 for both daily and dekadal estimates. MAE showed low miscalculations with values with an average of 1 mm per day and 4.4 mm per dekad. MBE was very low for both daily and dekadal evaluations but the disaggregated data showed underestimation of the IDW mostly for daily rainfall exceeding 10 mm. Thus, IDW methodology proved to be an acceptable approach for estimating both daily and dekadal rainfall in the Free State Province.