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 disease,” was published in the journal Brain.
Huntington’s disease is a genetic disease causing neuropsychiatric, motor, and cognitive deficits due to striatal neuronal loss. Several factors such as cellular cholesterol accumulation may contribute to neuronal dysfunction and death. The research team started by analyzing post-mortem samples of six patients diagnosed with Huntington’s, obtained from INSERM U289 Brain Bank at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris.
Read more about this in the full article here.