Parkinson disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that impairs movement, balance, speech, and other functions. It is characterized by the loss of nerves in the brain that produce a substance known as dopamine.

An unexpected finding turned out to be a clue leading researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to propose a new treatment approach for Niemann-Pick disease, a rare, deadly neurodegenerative disorder.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by extensive neuronal degeneration and the development of neuritic amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Neuronal and synaptic losses in AD are correlated with dementia and occur in specific brain areas involved in memory processing.

Chemists from UCLA and the University of Florence in Italy may have solved an important mystery about a protein that plays a key role in a particular form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disorder that strikes without warning.

The identification of more than 200 new proteins that interact with the mutated protein that causes Huntington's disease opens the door to developing treatments for the fatal neurodegenerative disorder, said a Baylor College of Medicine researcher who took part in the work that appears online today in the journal Public Library of Science Genetics.