New Neurodegeneration Research and Migraine
New research into neurodegeneration may give us clues to new migraine treatments, along with ways to fight Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and epilepsy.
The RobustSynapses project based in Europe has been involved in research which may indeed shed new light on a number of diseases. Patrik Verstreken of the Leuven Brain Institute in Belgium leads the team that has been using both fruit flies and human cells to study the systems that lead to degeneration in the brain.
Neurodegeneration is a very general term, but it is what it sounds like – a loss of function primarily in the neurons. So the RobustSynapses project is looking into how this function is lost, and how it can be restored.
To picture it in a very simple way, cells have sophisticated symptoms in place to “take out the garbage”. But what if there’s too much garbage? What if there is a genetic defect that causes more problems? What if the stinky mess starts spreading from cell to cell, across the brain? These issues can start to cause traffic problems, and so communication problems. Your sleep may be disrupted, or you might have trouble thinking, or you may experience pain when you shouldn’t.
You might say that this is very “close-up” research, looking at the function of individual cells, and the structure of proteins.
For example, the team discovered a specific problem with certain neurons that regulate sleeping patterns. There was a lack of a certain lipid (fat) (phosphatidylserine – found in tuna and white beans, for example), which may explain sleep problems in Parkinson’s patients (problems that sometimes show up much earlier than other symptoms).
Problems in certain cells might show up before the actual disease is very widespread, which means that these discoveries could lead not only to corrective measures (such as, perhaps, diet changes or a supplement to improve sleep in Parkinson’s patients), but actually preventing the progress of a disease.
Migraine and tension-type headache and their symptoms also show up on the cellular level. And we already know that there are some links between migraine, headache, and conditions such as dementia and Parkinson’s.
You can read more about the RobustSynapses project in this article from the European Commission: Brain study opens door to potential new disease treatments.