Preventing neurodegenerative disease

As a person ages, the brunt of illness falls increasingly on systems that have limited ability to repair or maintain themselves. Neurons, being post-mitotic, are particularly sensitive in this regard, and the outcome manifests in the increasing prevalence of neurodegenerative disease as the mean age of the population rises. For the individual experiencing a slowing of movement, wasting of a limb, tremor or a failing memory, the onset of symptoms appears to mark the onset of the underlying problem, and people often try to attribute cause based on recent events —‘It all started after the operation’, ‘I was fine until I had a bad cold’. The remarkable ability of the body to buffer and compensate for change means that in fact, neurodegeneration begins well before first symptoms. In Parkinson’s disease, 90% of neurons in the substantia nigra have been lost by the time the disease manifests.1 In Alzheimer ’s, there is a long presymptomatic prodrome.2 For those with a monogenic basis of their illness, such asC9orf72-mediated amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or frontotemporal dementia, the underlying pathological cause is present at birth but only manifests in symptoms decades later.3

Source: Brain - June 21, 2021 Category: Neurology Source Type: research