Huntington’s Disease Successfully Treated For First Time!

…and other items from this week’s health news:

Good news for those affected by Huntington’s Disease

Huntington’s disease is hereditary, and so determinably so that it’s often used in high school biology as an easy example of using a punnet square to determine inheritance; if one parent has the gene, you have a 50% chance of having it too. Symptoms usually show up in early adulthood, and once symptoms do appear, life expectancy is 15–20 years.

Because of increasing problems with muscle coordination (including autonomic functions like respiration and circulation) and cognitive decline, the top three Huntington’s-related causes of death currently are:

1. Pneumonia (more likely to accidentally inhale food/drink and can’t clear the lungs adequately)
2. Heart disease (heart not pumping correctly, and vascular tone is not great either)
3. Suicide (brain not doing well, and also quality of life is increasingly poor)

This new treatment developed by Dr. Sarah Tabrizi et al. is a single-dose gene therapy; a modified virus inserts DNA into neurons, which then produce microRNA to silence the faulty Huntington gene, reducing toxic protein levels.

In the first trials (n=29), three-year data is showing major slowing of symptoms and reduced brain cell loss, confirmed by lower neurofilament levels in spinal fluid, and a 75% reduction in disease progression after gene therapy, meaning that while it’s not a complete cure, degeneration that would normally take a certain amount of time will now take 4x as long.

In practical terms, if we remember that the life expectancy without treatment is 15–20 years, multiplying that by 4 makes a huge difference, given that symptoms usually show up in one’s 20s or 30s, as it moves the prognosis of Huntington’s-related death from age 35–50 or so, to to age 80–100 or so. In other words, it restores normal lifespan, and greatly improves quality of life along the way.

Indeed, some patients in the study have now returned to work, and/or left wheelchairs behind them, such has been their recovery.

Read in full: Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time

Related: Genetic Testing: Health Benefits & Methods

Good news for those affected by Multiple Sclerosis

This is also huge, and surprisingly easy, and a lot more accessible than the gene therapy in the previous story.

While scientists are still not really sure what actually causes MS or how it happens, they do know it has to do with neuronal demyelination, or “the protective sheathes around your neurons get degraded”—the biological equivalent of electrical wires getting stripped of the plastic coating, and thus short-circuiting or getting broken.

This new study found that pairing the diabetes drug metformin with the antihistamine clemastine shows potential to repair myelin damage in MS.

How it works: clemastine reactivates myelin repair, while metformin appears to enhance that effect. Together, they may protect against progressive nerve damage, though (alas) dead nerves cannot be regenerated this way.

Because nerves are famously tricky for the body to repair even with help, benefits may take longer than six months to appear. Side effects in the trial included fatigue from clemastine and diarrhea from metformin, so there are drawbacks too.

Read in full: “Exciting” clinical results provide hope for a new class of MS therapy

Related: Five Advance Warnings of Multiple Sclerosis

Good news for those affected by psoriasis

Ok, so this one’s arguably perhaps not as life-changing as the other two, but we’re continuing the good news streak here, and let’s face it, psoriasis isn’t fun and doesn’t tend to enrich life, so if its symptoms can be reduced by 75%, so much the better!

We’ll keep this one short: the Mediterranean diet is great for many things, and this is one more. In this study, 47.4% on the Mediterranean diet achieved 75% symptom reduction, versus 0% in the control group, with benefits independent of weight loss. So this one’s quite clear indeed.

How it works: the improvements are attributed to the diet’s anti-inflammatory and cardiometabolic properties, which we’ve written about before at 10almonds.

So, this one’s not surprising, but it certainly is good news:

Read in full: Mediterranean diet leads to 75% symptom reduction in patients with mild to moderate psoriasis

Related: Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean

Take care!