Congenital Atrophy: No ALS Involved

[SlavinBreeze]

Calm down. I have atrophy in my right hand all my life. I'm doing all activities including push-ups by fingers, playing percussionss, dee-jaying...In ALS atrophy begins AFTER fasciculations and/or weakness. If you have atrophy due to ALS you can't move your fingers, moving back-forth, typewriteing etc.
I think your "so called atrophy" is congenital.

 

[BandersnatchF]

In small muscles, it'd be very unusual for atrophy to precede weakness. The cause for atrophy is disconnection from the nerve supply that maintains muscle tone. In a large muscle, it might be possible for this weakness to go unnoticed by someone who wasn't paying attention—after all, most of us don't use full muscle force in our legs every day unless we do hard physical labor or sports (walking around the office doesn't count ). However, fingers are different—there aren't that many "backup" muscle fibers. You'd almost certainly notice weakness before significant atrophy. I've seen plenty of PALS stories that mention noticing hand weakness or clumsiness before atrophy, but I've never of heard of anyone saying that they noticed atrophy in their hand one day, went to the doctor, and were diagnosed with ALS.

Heck, I'm not sure I've ever seen a PALS story that mentions atrophy alone (without weakness) as a first symptom, and I've read a lot of stories. Again, atrophy is a result of weakness (more specifically, the disease process that causes weakness) in neuro-degenerative diseases, not a cause of that weakness.