Mindful Musings Amid Haircuts and Halloween

Quick! Guess where I was the other day? Hint: I spent quality time with a few ghosts, goblins and vampires. Nope, I didn’t visit a haunted house – I went for a haircut! You sure can’t tell from the outside, but where I go has an explosion…

Ipsen Biopharmaceuticals, an affiliate of Ipsen, announced that five abstracts discussing Dysport (abobotulinumtoxinA) were presented at the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (AAPM&R) Annual Assembly, held Oct. 12-15 in Denver, Colorado. Dysport, a botulinum toxin product, is approved for treatment of spasticity, or shaking, in adult patients, which…

Changes in the numbers of immune cells in the blood are associated with the progression of ALS, a study reports. Keeping tabs on the numbers could help doctors track the disease and researchers identify targets to develop treatments around, it said. The study, “Correlation of Peripheral Immunity…

Participating in the 2017 Annual Northeast ALS Consortium (NEALS) meeting in Florida recently, biotech company Oxford BioDynamics presented two different epigenetic signatures for the diagnosis and prognosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The presentation was a result of a prospective study to determine the sensitivity and specificity of two…

This segment from CBS Boston is sharing the good news that the FDA-approved drug Radicava, used for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is now available for patients in the U.S. MORE: Nine things to know about Radicava The breakthrough drug has been found to slow…

  In this video from ITV’s This Morning, television presenter Charlotte Hawkins talks about her father’s journey with motor neuron disease (MND), which is also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). She highlights how lonely people can feel living with the disease, particularly when they lose the…

Although there’s no cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, managing it wisely can increase survival and improve patients’ and their families’ quality of life. One tool for managing it is a feeding tube. An article in the journal Neurology covered the pluses and minuses of using the tubes in ALS. It…

A new genome wide association study (GWAS) conducted in multi-ethnic patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has demonstrated that the GPX3-TNIP1 gene locus is significantly associated with ALS. The study, “Cross-ethnic meta-analysis identifies association of the GPX3-TNIP1 locus with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” was published in…

During my last visit to the ALS clinic, my neurologist surprised me with an invitation to be a participant in a clinical trial that she was conducting. It was open to 50 of her patients, it could be completed in our own homes, and only it required…

Research indicates that an injury pathway in fruit fly neurons might be responsible for the loss of synapses in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Findings from the University of Michigan study were published in the open-access journal eLife, titled “Restraint…