This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Neurology  • Movement Disorders  • Transplantation  • Transplantation, Other  • Genetics  • Genetic Disorders  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Joan Stephenson, PhD

JAMA. 2009;302(7):732.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

New findings by scientists from Canada and the United States indicate that fetal neural tissue transplanted into the brain of patients with Huntington disease not only failed to slow or stop disease progression but also underwent degeneration similar to the pathological changes of this disorder (Cicchetti F et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009. doi:10.1073/pnas.0904239106 [published online ahead of print July 20, 2008]).

Studies in animal models had previously demonstrated that transplanted tissue from the striatum—the area of the brain most affected by Huntington disease—could survive and improve behavioral symptoms. Preliminary studies in patients with the disorder found modest clinical benefits from neural transplants, but they lasted for only 2 to 4 years.

In the current study, a postmortem examination of the brains of 3 patients with Huntington disease who received neural transplants 10 years earlier revealed that the transplanted cells degenerated . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?