October 23, 2015
The Complement System: Synaptic Pruning During Huntington's Disease
Huntington’s disease is an inherited brain disorder affecting 5 to 10 in every 100,000 people worldwide in all ethnic backgrounds and genders. Patients often display symptoms, such as changes in behavior, movement, personality, cognition, and memory. Although there is no cure, there has been much ongoing research to understand and develop possible treatment plans using mouse brain models. Principally, recent findings suggest that synapse elimination during normal synaptic pruning is reactivated and is responsible for some of the synaptic pathology in Huntington’s Disease. In this particular study, synapses in mouse brains were tagged and stained to test this hypothesis, and the results were compared to human brains to see if there were any correlations. Different academic research and surgical techniques were studied as well.
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