scholarly journals The Utility of BDNF Detection in Assessing Severity of Huntington’s Disease

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (21) ◽  
pp. 5181
Author(s):  
Klaudia Plinta ◽  
Andrzej Plewka ◽  
Krzysztof Pawlicki ◽  
Nikola Zmarzły ◽  
Magdalena Wójcik-Pędziwiatr ◽  
...  

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is involved in the survival and maturation of neurons, and also promotes and controls neurogenesis. Its levels are lowered in many neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington’s disease (HD). Clinical pictures of HD can be very diverse, which makes it difficult to assess its severity; however, molecular markers may be helpful. The aim of the study was to determine the relationship between HD severity and the plasma BDNF concentration in HD patients. The study recruited 42 patients with diagnosed and genetically confirmed HD and 40 healthy volunteers. BDNF levels were determined in plasma with the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Correlations between BDNF levels and clinical profiles and HD severity were also investigated. The BDNF level was significantly lower in HD patients compared to the control. There was no correlation between the BDNF level and motor symptoms and cognitive impairment. In the early disease stages, BDNF levels were associated with a better neurological examination, independence, and functional evaluation, in contrast to later HD stages, where the correlations were inverse. Multidirectional correlations between parameters of saccadic disorders and the BDNF level do not allow for drawing a conclusion, whether or not there is a relationship between the severity of saccadic disorders and the BDNF concentration.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis Cruickshank ◽  
Danielle Bartlett ◽  
Andrew Govus ◽  
Anthony Hannan ◽  
Wei‐Peng Teo ◽  
...  

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. e0253817
Author(s):  
Wasiq Khan ◽  
Sundus Alusi ◽  
Hissam Tawfik ◽  
Abir Hussain

Weight-loss is an integral part of Huntington’s disease (HD) that can start before the onset of motor symptoms. Investigating the underlying pathological processes may help in the understanding of this devastating disease as well as contribute to its management. However, the complex behavior and associations of multiple biological factors is impractical to be interpreted by the conventional statistics or human experts. For the first time, we combine a clinical dataset, expert knowledge and machine intelligence to model the multi-dimensional associations between the potentially relevant factors and weight-loss activity in HD, specifically at the premanifest stage. The HD dataset is standardized and transformed into required knowledge base with the help of clinical HD experts, which is then processed by the class rule mining and self-organising maps to identify the significant associations. Statistical results and experts’ report indicate a strong association between severe weight-loss in HD at the premanifest stage and measures of certain cognitive, psychiatric functional ability factors. These results suggest that the mechanism underlying weight-loss in HD is, at least partly related to dysfunction of certain areas of the brain, a finding that may have not been apparent otherwise. These associations will aid the understanding of the pathophysiology of the disease and its progression and may in turn help in HD treatment trials.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan L. Schultz ◽  
Amelia D. Moser ◽  
Peg C. Nopoulos

There is a known negative association between cytosine–adenine–guanine (CAG) repeat length and the age of motor onset (AMO) in adult-onset Huntington’s Disease (AOHD). This relationship is less clear in patients with juvenile-onset Huntington’s disease (JOHD), however, given the rarity of this patient population. The aim of this study was to investigate this relationship amongst a relatively large group of patients with JOHD using data from the Kids-JOHD study. Additionally, we analyzed data from the Enroll-HD platform and the Predict-HD study to compare the relationship between CAG repeat length and AMO amongst patients with AOHD to that amongst patients with JOHD using linear regression models. In line with previous reports, the variance in AMO that was predicted by CAG repeat length was 59% (p < 0.0001) in the Predict-HD study and 57% from the Enroll-HD platform (p < 0.0001). However, CAG repeat length predicted 84% of the variance in AMO amongst participants from the Kids-JOHD study (p < 0.0001). These results indicate that there may be a stronger relationship between CAG repeat length and AMO in patients with JOHD as compared to patients with AOHD. These results provide additional information that may help to model disease progression of JOHD, which is beneficial for the planning and implementation of future clinical trials.


2004 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-982 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vitor Tumas ◽  
Sarah Teixeira Camargos ◽  
Paulo Samandar Jalali ◽  
Adriano de Paula Galesso ◽  
Wilson Marques Jr

We evaluated the reliability of a translated Brazilian version of the Unified Huntington's Disease Rating Scale (UHDRS) to establish the reproducibility of the scale in a population that differs substantially from that on which the scale was originally validated. After a training period with the video and guidelines requested from the Huntington Study Group, we applied the UHDRS, except for the cognitive tests, to a group of 21 Brazilian patients with a molecular diagnosis of Huntington's disease (HD). We found a high degree of internal consistency of the motor section of the UHDRS (Cronbach's alpha= 0.841). There was a negative correlation between the total motor score and the functional assessment, the independence scale and the functional capacity. There was a positive correlation between these 3 scales of functional evaluation and a negative correlation between the age of onset of the disease and the number of CAG repeats. The behavioral scale and disease duration were not correlated with any factor. The clinical characteristics of this sample of patients as described by the UHDRS were roughly similar to those reported in the original validation studies and the correlations described were similar to those reported previously. We conclude that the Brazilian version of the UHDRS is reliable and valid to study patients with HD in the Brazilian setting, that this sample of Brazilian patients had clinical characteristics similar to those observed in other world regions, as expected, and that the clinical training method used for the application of the UHDRS was effective to insure a high degree of clinical reproducibility.


2009 ◽  
Vol 256 (10) ◽  
pp. 1629-1633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiří Klempíř ◽  
Olga Klempířová ◽  
Jan Štochl ◽  
Nataša Špačková ◽  
Jan Roth

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy Auinger ◽  
Karl Kieburtz ◽  
Michael P. Mcdermott

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