Reading Time: 3 minutes After attending the ENCALS meeting in May I was busy scheduling the ‘blog a day’ in June, which meant I didn’t get chance to actually report on any developments from the meeting. During our ‘blog a day’ we wrote a lot about genetics, in terms of the UK MND Whole Genome Sequencing project and the…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Dr Samantha Price is the Research Information Co-ordinator at the MND Association. As well as organising the ‘blog a day’ during MND Awareness Month she also communicates the latest news about MND research. Here she blogs about the MND Association’s announcement of the UK Whole Genome Sequencing project. It’s been a brilliant Awareness Month with…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Happy Father’s day! If you’ve got your dad a smartphone, or another hi-tech gadget, then this blog is perfect for you! Prof Ammar Al-Chalabi is a Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics at King’s College London. He is also Director of the King’s MND Care and Research Centre in London. Here he blogs about his Association-funded research…
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s been six months since the UK MND DNA Bank (DNA Bank) opened its doors to researchers around the world, so what has been happening to all those samples? Dr Lucy Smith, Research Information Administrator at the MND Association, explains: The DNA Bank is the first UK biobank dedicated to MND and has 3000 samples under…
Reading Time: 3 minutes We know that in the 5-10% of cases where there is a strong family history of MND, there is likely to be a genetic cause at work, acting like a weight to push the scales in favour of the disease occurring. These gene mutations are hidden somewhere within the 15 billion or so letters of…
Reading Time: 4 minutes The only ‘proven’ treatment to slow the progression of MND is Riluzole. There are, however, many organisations offering expensive ‘unproven’ and ‘alternative’ treatments for MND. We have worked with the organisation Sense about Science to help produce their ‘I’ve got nothing to lose by trying it’ information booklet so that people living with MND can…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Trying to understand what the different underlying factors are towards developing MND has always been a goal for ALS research. MND Association funded researcher and clinician Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi from King’s College London, gave a talk on this topic at the opening session of the 23rd International Symposium on ALS/MND in Chicago. A record number of…
Reading Time: 2 minutes We’ve been extremely excited about this research finding for a while now and have closely followed the progress of Prof Ammar Al-Chalabi’s publication as it was accepted into the prestigious journal Lancet Neurology. At times this was a rollercoaster journey – one that we were carefully watching from the sidelines with baited breath. The reason why we’re…
