Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Dystrophy
/ˈdɪstrəfi/noun
The progressive wasting of a tissue, most often used of the inherited muscle diseases.
The Greek roots
δυσ-
dys-
bad, faulty
τροφή
trophḗ
nourishment, feeding
Literally: “faulty nourishment”
The story of the word
The name preserves a nineteenth-century guess that the muscles were wasting because they were being badly fed. Duchenne described the commonest form in the 1860s; the real cause turned out to be a missing structural protein, which was found in 1987 and named dystrophin after the disease rather than the other way round. δυσ- is the exact opposite of εὖ, which is why dysentery and euphoria sit at either end of the same shelf.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
atrophyhypertrophydysenterytrophic
In a sentence
Her brother has the same dystrophy, diagnosed at four.