Slow brain repair seen in Huntington’s
By John Travis
From Orlando, Fla., at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
The human brain may struggle heroically, but in vain, to replace the nerve cells that die in Huntington’s disease, a New Zealand research team suggests.
Over the past few years, neuroscientists have been surprised to find that healthy, adult mammalian brains generate new nerve cells from so-called stem cells residing in select regions of the brain. It’s unclear how important this ongoing neurogenesis is, but some researchers have linked it to memory storage and other brain functions.