Reading Time: 3 minutes Bar a few bacteria usually found hitching a ride on our dental plaque and digestive system, every living cell in the human body needs oxygen. Some cells need more oxygen that others, dependent on much energy they need to produce to function. Neurones are particularly active cells (the brain uses a fifth of all the…
Reading Time: 2 minutes It wouldn’t be the Symposium without a new gene discovery. Although technology has allowed incredible advances in the gene-hunting field, this is countered by the fact that as more and more familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (FALS) genes are found, it makes the search for the remaining unknown genes harder This is in part due to…
Reading Time: 3 minutes With motor neurone disease (MND), the muscle weakness almost always starts in a single part of the body, with the weakness then spreading to other muscles in an orderly fashion. Neurologists are usually quite good at predicting which muscles will be affected next, slightly less so at predicting when this will happen. The physical changes…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Research into the neurodegenerative condition known as Guam ALS-Parkinson Dementia Complex (ALS-PDC) has tended to find itself slightly isolated from the mainstream MND/ALS research world (‘isolated’ being a good word given that the location of the island itself) but I’ve had an interest since I was first introduced to the subject as a PhD student…
Reading Time: 3 minutes The fantastic news that Patrick Joyce and his co-inventors have won the 2015 Hackaday Prize for their ‘Eyedrivomatic’ invention is one of a number of research prizes announced this autumn. At the beginning of November Prof Martin Turner was presented with the Graham Bull Prize for Clinical Science by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). The…
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: 4 minutes With all the talk of new gene discoveries in recent years, the Sunday morning scientific session returned to the original discovery in 1993 that mutations in the SOD1 gene were responsible for around a fifth of familial (inherited) MND cases and 2-3% of all cases of the disease. Although much of our understanding of MND…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Saturday afternoon saw the 25th International Symposium on ALS/MND expand from two to three sessions running in parallel. Times have changed from the early years of the meeting when sessions finished at lunchtime on the second day because there wasn’t enough stuff to talk about! Rather than flitting between three different lecture halls, I opted to…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Ever since the G8 summit on Dementia less than a year ago there has been a huge upsurge in international research activity in the field. In the UK, our friends at MRC Technology (an independent medical research charity which aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and clinical application) were instrumental in forming a…
Reading Time: 4 minutes With Pantomime season kicking off back home in the UK, delegates in Milan were introduced to one of the newest cellular villains in the MND story – oligodendrocytes. Although oligodendrocytes were first identified in the 1920s and are known to be affected in multiple sclerosis, they were generally considered as ‘bit part’ players in MND…
