Beating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s - The Italian Way

Corriere Della Sera covers a promising new medical breakthrough.

Scientists reveal mechanism that poisons cells to provoke diseases"

ROME – Think of a skip overflowing with rubbish. The cleansing department is on strike and the skip never gets emptied. It won’t be long before the contents begin to poison the air with unpleasant smells, pose public health problems and exasperate residents. Something very similar happens in all the cells in our bodies when they are unable to break down the toxins their own activities generate. Over time, the waste accumulates, triggering a chain of events that can bring on very serious conditions, like Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s chorea, Parkinson’s disease and a swath of accumulation syndromes, such as mucopolysaccharidosis, glycogenosis and others, on the long list of rare genetic diseases. The mechanism underlying this malfunction has now been revealed by researchers at TIGEM, the Telethon institute of genetics and medicine, in Naples. Yesterday, the study was published in Science. (More... )