From Reuters.
Huntington's May Be Simpler to Fight Than Thought (click to read entire story)

Thu Apr 1, 2004 02:00 PM ET

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Huntington's disease may be more straightforward to fight than doctors have feared, paradoxically because the genetic brain disorder is more complicated than anyone knew, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

Their research in fruit flies shows that nerve cells modify the mutated protein responsible for Huntington's disease, and this basic cell process could in theory be altered with a drug.

The researchers believe their finding, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, opens a new approach to treating the fatal and incurable disease.

Huntington's disease affects about 30,000 people in the United States. It is a dominant genetic defect, meaning that a child who inherits just one copy of the bad gene from a parent has a 50 percent chance of eventually developing Huntington's.

It hits late in life, usually after people have had children. It causes uncontrolled movements, loss of intellectual capacity and severe emotional disturbances before killing the patient.



CELL MUST TAKE ACTION

Larry Marsh, a developmental geneticist at the University of California Irvine, has been looking for a way to fight the disease and has been focusing on just what goes wrong inside the cells carrying the mutated gene, called huntingtin, which controls production of a protein also called huntingtin.