Huntington's Disease News and Research

Latest Huntington's Disease News and Research

Researchers find compound that interferes with the pathogenic effects of Huntington's disease

There is no cure for Huntington's, a neurodegenerative disorder that now afflicts 30,000 Americans, with another 150,000 at risk. The fatal disease, which is genetically inherited, usually strikes in midlife and causes uncontrolled movements, loss of cognitive function and emotional disturbance.

9 Mar 2006

Potential new treatment for Huntington and Parkinson patients

A potential new treatment for neurodegenerative disorders, which seems to be able to reduce the toxic protein aggregates characteristic of many of these diseases, is published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

7 Mar 2006

Mutant genes trigger AMD but may lighten the way to new treatments

According to new research in the U.S., the most common form of blindness in the elderly, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), can be attributed to just two genes which trigger the condition.

7 Mar 2006

Spinocerebellar ataxia and other neurodegenerative diseases might be treatable with drugs that alter the activity of potassium channels

For the first time, researchers have linked mutations in a gene that regulates how potassium enters cells to a neurodegenerative disease and to another disorder that causes mental retardation and coordination problems.

27 Feb 2006

Engineers identify tiny iron oxide particles associated with Alzheimer's

Engineers have found a way to pinpoint and identify the tiny iron oxide particles associated with Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases in the brain.

27 Feb 2006

PET and MR imaging reveals white matter degeneration in Huntington's

Using both brain function (PET) and anatomical structure (MR) imaging studies, Italian researchers - within the context of an Italian-British collaboration - discovered that degenerative and dysfunctional events occur in individuals many years before the onset of Huntington's disease - particularly in the brain's white matter - an area not previously considered primarily involved with the disease.

24 Feb 2006

Tetrabenazine cuts down involuntary movements in Huntington's disease

The medication tetrabenazine cut down involuntary movement in patients with Huntington's disease on average by about 25 percent, with many patients experiencing a greater improvement, according to a study in the February 14 issue of the journal Neurology.

17 Feb 2006

Research suggests that a common mechanism may underlie a variety of protein folding diseases

Misfolded and damaged proteins are common to all human neurodegenerative diseases. Clumps of these aggregated proteins destroy neurons within the brain and cause disease.

16 Feb 2006

A new way of recognising DNA

Scientists led by Mike Hannon at the University of Birmingham and Miquel Coll at the Spanish Research Council in Barcelona have discovered a new way that drugs can attach themselves to DNA, which is a crucial step forward for researchers who are developing drugs to combat cancer and other diseases.

16 Feb 2006

Rett disease progression altered by changing expression of gene

Scientists from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Brandeis University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology report in the journal Neuron that increasing levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) alleviates symptoms in a mouse model of the childhood disorder Rett Syndrome.

13 Feb 2006

Abraham Lincoln may have suffered from movement disorder

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of Minnesota have discovered a gene mutation in the descendants of Abraham Lincoln's grandparents that suggests the Civil War president himself might have also suffered from a disease that destroys nerve cells in the cerebellum-- the part of the brain that controls movement.

7 Feb 2006

New tool for genetic research

In an article appearing online today in the journal Nature Methods, researchers at the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fidirale de Lausanne) unveil a powerful new tool that will facilitate genetic research and open up new avenues for the clinical treatment of genetic disease.

23 Jan 2006

Retinal degeneration - researchers advance understanding

Researchers have labored for decades to understand blindness-inducing neurodegenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP).

18 Jan 2006

Gene therapy and exercise may help sufferers of Lou Gehrig's disease

A new study in mice gives hope that a combination of gene therapy and exercise may extend the lives of people who have Lou Gehrig's disease.

15 Nov 2005

Resveratrol effective in lowering amyloid-beta peptides

A study published in the November 11 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry shows that resveratrol, a compound found in grapes and red wine, lowers the levels of the amyloid-beta peptides which cause the telltale senile plaques of Alzheimer's disease.

7 Nov 2005

Protein called CHIP helps untangle protein misfolding in brain disease

Keeping the body and mind healthy depends on keeping cells healthy and functioning. This means that cells need a very robust quality-control system to repair or remove damaged or misshapen proteins. Protein handling is especially important in neurons because damage or death of brain cells causes neurological disease.

1 Nov 2005

Northwestern University move closer to new therapies for neurodegenerative disease

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot first described amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1869, but, nearly 140 years later, little is known about the cause of the devastating neurodegenerative disease, and there is no cure.

27 Oct 2005

Prozac helps learning and memory in people with Huntington's disease

People with Huntington's disease have progressive motor problems, cognitive deficits (dementia) and psychiatric symptoms (the most common is depression) that usually start to appear in mid-life. There is no cure and death usually results within 10 to 20 years of symptom onset, or faster in the childhood-onset form of the disease.

9 Oct 2005

Possible molecular origin of at least nine human diseases of nervous system degeneration

These neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington's disease, share an abnormal deposit of proteins inside nerve cells. This deposition of protein results from a kind of genetic stutter within the cell's nucleus asking for multiple copies of the amino acid glutamine, a building block of protein structure.

26 Sep 2005

Prions rapidly 'remodel' good protein into bad

Two Brown Medical School biologists have figured out the fate of healthy protein when it comes in contact with the infectious prion form in yeast: The protein converts to the prion form, rendering it infectious. In an instant, good protein goes bad.

19 Sep 2005