Staying Fit
It’s been about one year since famed singer Céline Dion revealed that she was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder known as stiff-person syndrome. And now, her sister is giving an update on her health.
In a recent interview with the French publication 7 Jours, Claudette Dion said the Grammy-award winning artist no longer has control of her muscles. “What pains me is that she has always been disciplined. She always worked hard,” Claudette said in the interview.
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Last December, Dion opened up about her diagnosis in an emotional video posted on Instagram, where the singer explained that she’d been battling health issues for a while, including severe and persistent muscle spasms that interfered with her performing.
“Unfortunately, the spasms affect every aspect of my daily life, sometimes causing difficulties when I walk and not allowing me to use my vocal cords to sing the way I’m used to,” Dion said in the video.
Muscle spasms are a common symptom of stiff-person syndrome, which also has features of an autoimmune disease and is estimated to affect fewer than 5,000 people in the U.S., according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“The body, for some reason, starts to fight itself in an autoimmune type of way, where it will attack the nerves in the muscles, causing [them] to be more sensitive and overactive and stiff,” explains Desimir Mijatovic, M.D., a pain specialist with the Cleveland Clinic.
The trunk and the abdominal muscles are typically the first to stiffen, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The muscles in the limbs, even the face, can also be affected. Depending on the areas of the body that are impacted, “it can become difficult to move around,” Mijatovic says, “so this can cause a lot of problems for people in their daily lives.”
Stimuli like noise, stress and touch can trigger the stiff muscles to spasm. (These spasms can occur for no reason, too.) Some people experience spasms so severe that the force generated can fracture a bone or cause them to fall, the NIH says.