Electron beam snaps best images yet of Huntington’s disease protein
Electrons enable huntingtin protein, the cause of Huntington’s disease, to be visualised at highest resolution ever Figuring out the shape of a protein can help scientists understand how it works and what goes wrong in disease. Huntingtin, the protein that causes Huntington’s disease, has been an elusive target. A recent study using electron microscopes offers […]
Study Finds Prenatal Testing for Huntington’s Should Include Psychological Support
Magdalena Kegel reports on huntingtonsdiseasenews.com that new research from University Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière at Sorbonne University, France indicates that couples at risk of transmitting Huntington’s disease to their children need more psychological support before pre-natal testing of the embryo’s genetic status, and additional counseling should they choose to reproduce again. In practice, about 5-25% of men and women at risk for […]
Enroll-HD Monthly News Bulletin – June 2016
June 2016 Monthly News Bulletin Latest Enroll-HD data release The second Enroll-HD periodic dataset that includes the clinical data from 4146 participants is now available on the Enroll-HD website to any researcher employed at a recognized research institution or company. You can learn more about the types of data and biosamples that are available and […]
10,000 now signed up to Enroll-HD!
On April 8 2016, Enroll-HD reached a milestone as the 10,000th person signed up to be part of the study. That person joined 9,999 others in the worldwide collaborative effort to understand more about HD and provide an infrastructure for more and better research and provide an infrastructure for more and better research, including clinical […]
Important drug targets yielded by new genetic study of HD
It’s a great mystery why different people with the same HD mutation sometimes develop symptoms at vastly different ages. Last year a huge genetic analysis gave us some interesting clues, and now, researchers are focusing in on the most promising results. A recent study shows that tiny changes within genes that repair damaged DNA can […]
Thinking clearly about the earliest symptoms of HD and which brain regions control them
HD reaches more brain structures than we thought: new research broadens our understanding of the earliest signs of HD Cognitive deficits, or difficulties thinking clearly, often appear well before the traditional clinical diagnosis of Huntington’s disease (HD). While many contend that the earliest cognitive deficits are caused by damage to the striatum – a structure […]
Huntington’s Disease-causing Gene Safely Deleted from Brains of Adult Mice
Margarida Azevedo wites on HuntingtonDiseaseNews.com how Emory University researchers deleted the Huntington’s disease-causing protein, huntingtin, in the brains of adult mice, and observed that such deletion was safe in adults though not in relatively newborn mice. The study, “Ablation of huntingtin in adult neurons is nondeleterious but its depletion in young mice causes acute pancreatitis” […]
Huntington’s Disease Therapies May Target Cholesterol Metabolism in Future
Teresa Pais has written on HuntingtonDiseaseNews.com of how Huntington’s disease (HD) patients are known to have a dysregulation of cholesterol metabolism but how recent has shown that manipulation of cholesterol levels in striatal neurons can improve motor deficits in an animal model of Huntington’s. The study, “CYP46A1, the rate-limiting enzyme for cholesterol degradation, is neuroprotective in […]
Huntington’s Drug That Silences Gene at Root of Disease Now in Phase 1 Clinical Test:
Timea Polgar has reported on Huntingtonsdiseasenews.com how a drug targeting the cause of Huntington’s disease (HD) was found effective and safe in animal tests, and clinical studies in humans are beginning, according to newly released data that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology‘s 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, on April 15–21, 2016. […]
Huntington’s Research Likely to Benefit from Device Aiding Studies of Neurological Diseases in a Living Animal
On Huntingtonsdiseasenews.com Kara Elam has described how researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, led by Dr. Matteo Cornaglia, PhD, have developed a new experimental device that can assist scientists in the analysis of molecular pathway studies related to complex human dysfunctions, such as neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington’s (HD). The device is intended for use […]