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Similarities between sporadic and familial ALS
DOI: 10.1038/nbt.1957
Both sporadic and familial forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are associated with astrocytes that are toxic to motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord of patients. The findings, reported online this week in Nature Biotechnology, highlight how astrocytes, a type of neuron helper cell, are critical to the disease mechanisms for both types of ALS and provide a model to evaluate potential therapies.
ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease, characterized by loss of motor neurons in the motor cortex, brain stem, and spinal cord, and leading to muscle paralysis. Approximately 90% of ALS cases are sporadic (SALS), with no family history of the disease, though the mechanism for these cases was undetermined. A small portion of the familial cases of ALS (FALS) are known to be associated with astrocytes harbouring SOD1 gene mutations, though its relevance to SALS was unknown.
Brian K Kaspar and colleagues investigated the role of astrocytes in both sporadic and familial ALS by generating astrocytes from postmortem spinal cord tissue derived from patients who suffered from either SALS or FALS. They found that astrocytes from both patients groups were similarly toxic to mouse motor neurons. Furthermore, by knocking out the SOD1 gene in astrocytes derived from SALS patients, the authors observed significantly weakened astrocyte-mediated toxicity towards the mouse motor neurons. Given the similarities to FALS, the authors suggest that SOD1 may play an important role in the disease mechanism of SALS as well.
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