Glimmers of hope in the war on a cruel disease
JANUARY can be a miserable month at the best of times, but on top of the usual cold days and dark nights we now have lockdown fatigue, so it is easy to feel like there is not much hope in the world.
But last week there was some genuinely good news – and right here in Scotland.
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have made a huge breakthrough while researching exactly how motor neurone disease attacks the body and how to treat the condition.
MND is a horrible disease. It attacks the nerves that control movement, so that muscles no longer work. It is also a death sentence, killing a third of people within a year of diagnosis and more than half within two years.
There is no cure and no effective treatment. On average, six people are diagnosed with MND in the UK every day.
What researchers do know about the disease is that our motor neurones are nerves which control important muscles allowing us to walk, grip, type, speak, swallow and breathe.
MND attacks these nerves and as the attacks occur, messages gradually stop reaching muscles.
Patients are unable to make their body do what they are trying to tell it, they become weak, suffer muscle wastage and then, eventually, become paralysed and cannot breathe without the help of a machine.
Because MND doesn’t usually attack a person’s senses or brain cells, patients are aware of every single way that their body is failing them – their alert mind is trapped in an immovable, unresponsive casing.
What the Scots researchers have discovered is that the damage to nerve cells caused by MND can be repaired.
The science is tricky but the team explained it in a way that even laypeople can understand – motor neurones have a power supply made up of mitochondria and, if the energy levels of that power supply are boosted, then the damage can be repaired. In more detail, the nerve cells have a long tail called an axon, which is the bit that connects the nerve to the muscle and which the mitochondria run up and down.
In MND patients, the tail is shorter and it is harder to get the instructions from nerve to muscle. But by boosting energy levels, the tail grows back to its original, longer length.
DR Arpan Mehta, who led the study at the Euan MacDonald Centre for MND research said: ‘The importance of the axon in motor nerve cells cannot be understated.
‘Our data provides hope that by restoring the cell’s energy source we can protect the axons and their connection to muscle from degeneration.’
It won’t stop people getting MND, but it could stop the horrific body breakdown that patients experience.
Of course, while Dr Mehta and his team are at the sharp end of the research, there is a whole team who have helped him and his colleagues get to this point and take the research on.
The cost has been financed by the Medical Research Council, the Motor Neurone Disease Association, the Euan MacDonald Centre for MND Research, the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, the UK Dementia Research Institute and the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic.
There is a direct line from people doing sponsored events or chucking their change into a bucket to this breakthrough, potentially offering patients decades more to live, with a quality of life unrecognisable to that which they can expect now. It is a genuine game-changer.
But the work doesn’t stop. The race is now on to find drugs which can act as the energy booster needed by MND patients’ mitochondria.
Dr Mehta is hopeful that such a drug already exists. He said: ‘Work is already under way to identify existing licensed drugs that can boost the mitochondria and repair the motor neurones. This will pave the way to test them in clinical trials.’
An existing drug could be fasttracked through the system and trialled on real patients soon.
MND is a cruel condition that robs people of their hope, bodies and, ultimately, their lives.
The passion, energy and hard work of scientists, charities and fundraisers could hand all of that back to patients. And that is good news in these depressing times.