Publications by authors named "Z Voysey"
Article Synopsis
- Scientists studied a protein called neurofilament light (NfL) to see if it can help predict Huntington's disease (HD) over a long time.
- They collected blood samples from people with the HD gene and from healthy people over a 14-year period to compare NfL levels.
- The results showed that higher NfL levels were connected to a higher risk of developing symptoms of HD, and it could help identify who might get the disease earlier.
Article Synopsis
- Sleep dysfunction is common in Huntington's disease (HD) and can worsen symptoms and quality of life while potentially speeding up the disease's progression.
- Current treatments for HD do not address sleep issues or the effects of medications on sleep.
- The review evaluates existing research and presents a framework for understanding how different medications affect sleep, along with highlighting new therapies for sleep dysfunction in HD.
Introduction: Mounting evidence supports the existence of an important feedforward cycle between sleep and neurodegeneration, wherein neurodegenerative diseases cause sleep and circadian abnormalities, which in turn exacerbate and accelerate neurodegeneration. If so, sleep therapies bear important potential to slow progression in these diseases.
Findings: This cycle is challenging to study, as its bidirectional nature renders cause difficult to disentangle from effect.
Sleep dysfunction is highly prevalent across the spectrum of neurodegenerative conditions and is a key determinant of quality of life for both patients and their families. Mounting recent evidence also suggests that such dysfunction exacerbates cognitive and affective clinical features of neurodegeneration, as well as disease progression through acceleration of pathogenic processes. Effective assessment and treatment of sleep dysfunction in neurodegeneration is therefore of paramount importance; yet robust therapeutic guidelines are lacking, owing in part to a historical paucity of effective treatments and trials.
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