Reading Time: 6 minutes Each year, MND Associations across the globe mark 21 June as a special day of recognition, acknowledging the impact that MND has on people around the world. MND is a global problem. It does not discriminate, and for every person diagnosed the effects of the disease will be forever felt by their families and friends.…
Reading Time: 5 minutes A recent study has assessed the extent to which genetics plays a role in the development of MND, in both familial and non-familial (sporadic) forms of the disease. This research has arisen as a result of an international collaboration of several research institutes, many of whom have been supported by the MND Association. The world-class…
Reading Time: 9 minutes A paper arising from research carried out at the University of Sheffield as part of the AMBRoSIA biobank, and in collaboration with the international Project MinE gene-hunting consortium, was recently published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. Researchers propose that a test for the most common MND genes could be offered to all…
Reading Time: 6 minutes Today marks 10 years since the MND Association’s research blog first started, making it our ‘blogiversary’. It officially began with a welcome post from our very own director, Dr Brian Dickie, which talked about the main purpose of the blog – to share what’s going on in the world of MND research and give you…
Reading Time: 3 minutes MND Association-supported clinical fellow Dr Johnathan Cooper-Knock, and a PhD student Tobias Moll, report mutations in a new MND gene which has uncovered a previously unknown disease mechanism. The new MND causing gene holds instructions for a class of proteins, called glycosyltransferase (GLT8D1), which has not previously been associated with neurodegeneration. During the experiments, published…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Two sets of MND genetic results were published yesterday. One of these results was about the importance of a new gene called NEK1. The second highlighted the role of gene C21orf2 in MND – we wrote an article about this yesterday. Both sets of results were published in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics. What are…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Today some exciting news about the genetics of MND was published in the scientific journal Nature Genetics. The results come in two research papers published in the same issue of the journal. This blog post discusses the results of the first of these papers for which King’s College London based Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi was one…
Reading Time: 4 minutes During MND Awareness Month we are highlighting some of the research the MND Association funds in our ‘Project a Day’ series. Today, on global ALS/MND awareness day, we wanted to give you a look at the research into motor neurone disease taking place elsewhere. Thousands of researchers across the globe are working towards a world…
Reading Time: 2 minutes During MND Awareness Month (1-30 June), we will be publishing a new post each day. Our ‘Project a Day’ series will celebrate the whole range of areas in which the MND Association funds research. Thanks to the generous donations of our supporters, we currently fund over 80 research projects, across five themes: Causes: These projects aim…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Project MinE is an international genetics project that is analysing DNA from people with MND in detail. For the majority of people with MND, the disease appears ‘sporadically’ for no apparent reason. For a small number of people, approximately 5-10% of those with MND there is an inherited link, in other words the disease runs in…
