This week, we will be discussing inflammation associated with neurodegenerative disease. Neurodegenerative disease is the umbrella term that encompasses diseases that involve progressive dysfunction and loss of neurons in the central nervous system. Some examples of neurodegenerative diseases include Parkinson disease, Alzheimer disease, multiple sclerosis, Huntington's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gherig's disease, and Friedreich's ataxia. These diseases may cause decline of motor functioning and cognitive functioning, and eventually death. The impact of these diseases can be devastating to patients and their family members, not only functionally and emotionally but also economically. Thousands of dollars are spent on medical care provided by physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, dietitians, and social workers. Thousands of dollars are also spent on research focused on preventing or remediating these diseases.
The articles for this week's discussion indicated that, while researchers are making progress toward understanding the mechanisms behind these diseases, effective treatment approaches for these diseases have not yet been discovered. Even when treatment approaches seem to work in the early phases of research, they later prove to be ineffective and even sometimes result in lethal side effects. As economic times become even more challenging, fewer and fewer studies will be approved, and the progress toward finding effective therapeutic approaches will likely be stalled even more.
What are your suggestions for improving the system for research that we have now to facilitate progress toward finding effective treatments for neurodegenerative diseases?
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Although finding a cure to neurodegenerative diseases is extremely elusive due to the fact that some drugs and proteins dont make it past th blood-brain barrier, there are some new ideas on the rise that can reduce the symptoms of these diseases. One example is to implant neural tissues from fetal animals into the brain to restore the degenerate area. More ways can be found at: http://www.healingwell.com/library/parkinsons/henkel1.asp
ReplyDeleteI feel like an issue with our current research is in our animal models. Me often choose, in the case of neurodegenerative diseases, mice which have genetic susceptibility to a disease similar to the one we are studying. I feel it is unfair to use any one animal model representative of a disease state and that we are obligated to use all animal models of a particular disease state because we do not yet have causation (or at least a full understanding of causative effects). Whereas I can appreciate current clinical experimentation to treat such disorders, I feel that we must first understand the inflammatory process in the brain and its tissues fully before we can begin to customize treatment toward some specific neurodegenerative disorder.
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