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Rare neurodegenerative diseases are not islands; they promise insights into the way genetic disease causes brain cells to die. Finding the way neurodegeneration occurs in the very rare neuroacanthocytosis (NA) will help the search for the cause of Parkinson’s (PD) and Huntington's (HD) diseases.
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Beneficiaries
Situation
PD, HD and other less common diseases of the same part of the brain (basal ganglia) devastate lives and have huge cost to society. We need to learn why cells in this part of the brain die prematurely.
Solution
Neuroacanthocytosis is a group of four neurodegenerative diseases offering clues into basal ganglion cell death. Each disease produces similar severe movement disorders, but each has a different genetic character that has already been identified. Study of the cell death of these diseases is quite new, but there are already promising results that suggest that a pathway of events in the cells ultimately leading to cell death and eventually the severe movement disorders similar to PD and HD