Local medical experts have detected immunological features of a type of fatal muscle disease, which can provide targets for new drugs and new therapy development.

Dermatomyositis is a muscle disease that involves inflammation and a skin rash. It is an autoimmune disease, a type of rheumatic disease.

Doctors said anyone can develop this condition, while it most often occurs in children aged between five and 15 years and adults aged 40 to 60. It affects women more often than men.

MDA5+DM is a special type of dermatomyositis and can quickly trigger rapidly progressive interstitial lung disease (RPILD). About 40 percent of the patients die within one year.

However, the mechanism of the disease remains unclear and there is no effective treatment, so the disease is a hot topic for clinical and basic research in the field of rheumatology, said experts from Shanghai's Renji Hospital.

The clinical team of Renji's rheumatology department joined hands with local immunology scientists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to analyze the blood and lung tissues of patients with MDA5+DM and detected the disease's immunological features, which offer targets to improve treatment effects and prolong patients' survival.

The discovery results were published in Nature Communications.