International Conference in Brussels, Belgium, 17-19 November 2009.

On behalf of TREAT-NMD and NIH, who organized this meeting, I, Günter Scheuerbrandt, a biochemist from Germany, have written this report for all young and older people with neuromuscular diseases, and for their families and care givers. It contains summaries of the 27 presentations and of some of the discussions in between. I have tried to write this report in a way that will let you understand most of what was presented and discussed.

But I had to keep this text short, so I could not explain all scientific details. Thus, if you would like to really understand the different research approaches for a therapy of at least one of the diseases, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, you should read my research reports, which you can see on my internet pages and can download them from there as pdf files: www.duchenne-information.eu in English, Spanish, and German.

As in my other reports, I have written the names of the scientists at the beginning of the summaries without their academic titles, many of them are professors and practically all have an MD or PhD degree.