Professor Markus Deschauer’s clinical and scientific focus is on neuromuscular diseases, in particular hereditary forms, for which gene-specific treatment is becoming increasingly important.

Neuromuscular diseases lead to muscle weakness or premature fatigue. There are many causes: it can be caused by impaired force development in the muscle itself, impaired nerve-muscle communication, damage to innervating peripheral nerves, or damage to motor neurons in the spinal cord and/or brain. Accordingly, these include very different diseases: acquired or hereditary myopathies, myasthenic syndromes (eg, myasthenia gravis), hereditary or inflammatory neuropathies (eg, HMSN or CIDP/GBS) and motor neuron diseases (eg, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS and spinal muscular atrophy , SMA).

Professor Deschauer studied medicine in Erlangen and in 1996. After completing his internship as a physician, he moved from the neurological university clinic in Erlangen to the neurological university clinic in Halle/Saale.

He was actively involved in the establishment of the Muscle Disease Research Laboratory in Halle and was involved in molecular genetic research, especially in the case of metabolic muscle diseases.

In 2002, a research fellowship from the European Neurological Society (ENS) took him to Newcastle upon Tyne in England, where he conducted research on genotype-phenotype relationships in mitochondrial diseases in the Mitochondrial Research Group.

Recognized as a specialist in neurology, he then worked as a senior physician in Halle.

In 2005, he received a research award from the German Society for Muscular Diseases (DGM) for his doctoral thesis entitled “Molecular genetic analysis of metabolic myopathies.”

From 2007 to 2014, Professor Deschauer was a senior consultant at Halle/Saale and helped shape the clinic’s neuromuscular disease area under the leadership of Professor Zirz.

Professor Deschauer has been working for many years on the genetic problems of not only neuromuscular diseases, but also other neurological diseases. At the German Society of Neurology, he is the lead author of the guideline “Diagnosis of Myopathies” and a member of the expert group of the guideline “Mitochondriopathies”, and heads the outpatient clinic for muscle diseases and hereditary neurological diseases, as well as the electroneuromyography laboratory and the center for rare neurological diseases at the University Hospital Rechts der Isar in Munich.