Greystone Associates Analysis Reveals Growing Interest and Development Activity in Inhaled Drugs for Central Nervous System Disorders

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.

Alien hand syndrome (AHS) is a rare neurological disorder that causes hand movement without the person being aware of what is happening or having control over the action. The afflicted person may sometimes reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the healthy hand to restrain the alien hand.

Last month, Dr. George Bartzokis, director of the UCLA Memory Disorders and Alzheimer's Disease Clinic, suggested in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia that the breakdown of a type of myelin that develops late in life promotes the buildup of toxic amyloid plaques long associated with Alzheimer's disease. Myelin is the "insulation" that wraps around nerve axons in the brain.