Devastating disease provides insight into development and death of motor neurons
University of California, Los Angeles | April 29, 2012 | By Mark Wheeler
Researchers at UCLA have been searching for the cause of a rare disease that virtually no one has ever heard: PCH1, or pontocerebellar hypoplasia type 1, which attacks the brain and the spine.
It’s a particularly cruel disorder, occurring mostly in infants, who begin manifesting symptoms at or soon after birth, with poor muscle tone, difficulty feeding, growth retardation and global developmental delay.
Now, thanks to the cooperation of a California family stricken by the disorder and a state-of-the-art genomic sequencing lab at UCLA, Dr. Joanna Jen, a UCLA professor of neurology, and colleagues discovered a specific mutation of a gene that is responsible for PCH1 in this family, then confirmed mutations in the same gene in several other PCH1 families around the world.
The study appears in the April 29 in the online edition of the journal Nature Genetics.
Click HERE or on the image below to read more…
SMAHeadlines.com 
oferte vacanta…
[…]Devastating disease provides insight into development and death of motor neurons « SMAHeadlines.com[…]…