FEEDING a simple sugar to mice with Huntington’s disease slows brain degeneration, reports Nobuyuki Nukina’s team at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Saitama, Japan.
The researchers fed a natural sugar called trehalose to mice genetically engineered to have a severe version of Huntington’s disease. The disease is caused by mutations in the gene for the huntingtin protein. The defective protein forms clumps that kill brain cells. At 12 weeks, the treated mice had a third fewer clumps in the parts of the brain that control movement than untreated mice (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm985). They also lived about 10 per…
