Reading Time: 3 minutes Manchester this half term will be the showcase for two MND awareness events we’ve been working on with Dr Emma Hodson-Tole and Dr Rickie Patani. We’ll be publishing a series of blogs about what’s happening and why through this week. In the first Dr Emma Hodson-Tole explains what the events are about. It is coming…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Did you know the MND Association also supports people who have Kennedy’s disease? In May a new clinic specialising in Kennedy’s disease opened in London at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. To mark this big step in helping support and treat people with Kennedy’s disease, Katy Styles who campaigns on behalf of the Association, and whose husband Mark has…
Reading Time: 3 minutes A new study published yesterday in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry (JNNP) highlights the link between increased exposure to formaldehyde and an increased risk of developing MND. The study in the USA was conducted by Andrea Roberts and colleagues at the Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Harvard. They investigated whether a person’s exposure…
Reading Time: 3 minutes The MND Association’s Director of Research, Brian Dickie explains more about ‘GM6’, also known as ‘GM604’, a drug in development by an American pharmaceutical company Genervon. The Association funds a wide range of research that leads to new understanding and treatments, which may one day, bring us closer to a cure for MND. We are hopeful…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Today is world Rare Disease Day, so it’s an appropriate time to raise awareness of ALL rare diseases, including motor neurone disease. There are between 6,000 and 8,000 rare diseases, but what makes a ‘rare disease’? A rare disease is defined by the European Union as one that affects less than 5 in 10,000 of…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Dr Frank Hirth is one of the world’s leading fruit fly MND researchers. Based at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, he has been working on an Association-funded project developing a C9orf72 fruit fly model of MND. Here we mark the end of this project, and report on what the…
Reading Time: 3 minutes In a fitting start to a new year, the results of the Palliative and End of Life Care Priority Setting Partnership top 10 priorities for research were released today. The topics range from: the best way to get out of hours palliative care, how to provide palliative care for everyone irrespective of where they live…
Reading Time: < 1 minute We would like to wish all our MND Research blog readers a very merry Christmas. To celebrate, we’re posting a short blog during each of the twelve days of Christmas to highlight what we’ve achieved this year in terms of MND research. “On the first day of Christmas MND research gives to you… ONE vision,…
Reading Time: 3 minutes This autumn sees an exciting new development in the MND Association’s DNA Bank. Researchers can now use the samples within it to understand why motor neurones die as well as what the triggers are for MND. How the DNA Bank began Beginning in 2003 and running until 2012, approximately 1,500 people with MND, 1,000 healthy…
Reading Time: 5 minutes A question was submitted to the Association’s AGM last weekend, which could only be answered in brief at the time, due to the number of issues raised, some of which are of a technical nature. Below is a more detailed response from the Association’s Director of Research (in bold italics) to each point raised.
