FTD tagged posts

Two progressively degenerative diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD, recently in the news with the diagnoses of actor Bruce Willis and talk show host Wendy Williams), are linked by more than the fact that they both damage nerve cells critical to normal functioning—the former affecting nerves in the brain and spinal cord ...

The dentate gyrus of the mouse hippocampal formation which contributes to the formation of new episodic memories stained for neurons (green) and stem cells (red). Credit: Andrew L Bashford and Vasanta Subramanian University of Bath

Scientists identify 2 regions of mouse brains where C9orf72 is expressed. For the first time novel expression sites in the brain have been identified for a gene which is associated with Motor Neuron Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia. Many people who develop Motor Neuron Disease, also called Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and/or Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) have abnormal repeats of nucleotides within a gene called C9orf72 which causes neurons to die.

A team from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry at the University of Bath discovered for the first ti...

Neurons, red, created from ALS patients bearing the C9orf72 mutation, show clumps of the RanGAP protein, yellow, in their nuclei, white. The nuclei of other cells are in blue.
Credit: Jeffrey Rothstein laboratory, Johns Hopkins Medicine

The 1st steps in how a common gene mutation causes brain damage associated with both amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) have been found by Johns Hopkins researchers. Altered C9orf72 gene on human chromosome 9, causes RNA molecules to block critical pathways for protein transport, causing a molecular traffic jam outside brain cell nuclei and affecting their operations and survival. In a proof-of-concept experiment, a molecular therapy eased the jam and restored molecular flow into the cell’s core.

The mutation, the most comm...