"degenerated from" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is used to express a change from one thing to another that is not necessarily an improvement. For example: The once thriving city has degenerated from a vibrant metropolis to a ghost town.
Their evening quickly degenerated from that far from promising start.
The watchword of political discourse has degenerated from "movement" to "spin".
But his main problem, surely, is mental.How else to explain a short game that has degenerated from divine to disastrous?
Her circumstances quickly degenerated from working in a casino to a life derailed by debts, drugs and prostitution.
Relations between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, its two constituent parties, have degenerated from respectful union to surly cohabitation.
Our house was one block from Greenmount Avenue, a thoroughfare that degenerated from a vibrant shopping district to fast-food and check-cashing joints — and to crack cocaine.
When filmmakers do ground their basketball films in "real life," the results degenerate from the ridiculous.
Several expeditions were on the mountain over the weekend, and some reports said about a dozen climbers were stranded at Bottleneck, a region known as the "Death Zone" because bodies begin degenerating from lack of oxygen.
When reality TV began to degenerate from its genuinely interesting beginnings, I wrote that the logic of the genre led inexorably to suicide or homicide, and was accused of exaggeration.
As it degenerates from its thrilling opening air crash into a rehab-friendly, cod-religious sobriety tract, one remembers this is a Robert Zemeckis movie, and he is prone to this sort of thing.
Nicholson drew barbs at the time for what some critics felt was the over-the-top nature of his performance in the final half-hour, when he degenerates from a taunting madman into a screaming, grunting beast with an axe.
