Misdiagnosis results in Portuguese man spending 43 years in a wheelchair, patient walks at age 56

In June 2014, a paralysed Brazilian teen used a robotic exoskeleton to make the first kick at the FIFA World Cup, demonstrating how a human could control a robot using neural signals. However, a wheelchair-bound Portuguese man discovered when he was 56 that all it takes for him to walk again is not high-tech gadgets but asthma medication.

Agence France-Presse reports that the case of 61-year-old Rufino Borrego was a misdiagnosis which bound him to a wheelchair for 43 years before the error was discovered. He was 13 when doctors at a Lisbon hospital diagnosed Borrego as suffering from incurable muscular dystrophy.

He learned to live life as a paralysed person for more than four decades when a neurologist diagnosed him in 2010 that his ailment was myasthenia which weakens muscle. The rare disease could be treated by giving Borrego asthma drugs.

In 2011, Borrego surprised his neighbours in Alandroal, southeast Portugal, when they saw the man in his mid-50s walking for the first time on his way to the community café. He now lives a normal life and just needs to have two physiotherapy sessions a year.

But Borrego says he is not angry at the Lisbon hospital for the wrong diagnosis since myasthenia was almost unknown in the medical community in the 1960s when he fell ill. Meanwhile, there is a new drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) which the US Food and Drug Administration approved on Sept 19.

It is Exondys 51, known by its generic name eteplirsen, an injection. The vaccine is for patients with confirmed mutation of the dystrophin gene amenable to exon 51 skipping which affects 31 percent of patients with DMD.

VIDEO: Misdiagnosed muscle atrophy white man sitting on a wheelchair for 43 years

Source: apple