Posted July 11, 2010

Save the date: October 16, 2010 to attend the Huntington Study Group's (HSG) fourth annual clinical research symposium to be held in San Diego, California.  Frances Saldana, an important family advocate and several top HD clinical research scientists will be among the featured speakers. Results from clinical studies and trials will be reported either during this session or in the accompanying poster presentations. Following the symposium Charles Sabine will kick-off a clinical study and research workshop for HD families.  It promises to be a rewarding day.

And whether or not you can make it to San Diego, please take the time to fill out the accompanying HSG survey -- and give your opinions about HD clinical studies and trials.

Posted July 3, 2010 by LaVonne Veatch Goodman, M.D.

Abilify is the brand name of a relatively new antipsychotic drug initially approved in 2002, which is used in the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. Though this drug has been available for almost a decade, it's use in Huntington's disease (HD) is more recent, with the first scientific report of benefit for HD appearing in a single case report in 2008.  Subsequent scientific publications of small studies on the use of Abilify in HD report positive treatment effects for psychosis, chorea -- with size benefit nearly equal to tetrabenazine -- as well as trend toward benefit in depression and cognition.

Posted April 15, 2010 by LaVonne Goodman MD

RNA interference (RNAi) therapy was an important theme at the 2010 HD Therapeutics Conference.  If this type of therapy can be fully mastered by scientists and drug developers it could be very promising because it will treat HD at its source by reducing the amount of defective huntingtin protein that is produced in cells. RNA interference works by introducing into cells short pieces of RNA that recognize and then destroy the means to produce huntingtin protein. While there were many posters detailing research in different types of RNAi, the major presentations centered on small molecule RNAi.

Posted July 7, 2010 by LaVonne Veatch Goodman

Dr. Edmondson is a medical physician and a psychiatrist from Duke University, North Carolina who gave several workshops at the recent HDSA convention in Raleigh.  She is also a founder of the North Carolina Center for the Care of Huntington's Disease NC-CCHD), a new and exciting organization that provides education, medical and social service care for Huntington's (HD) families in North Carolina.  And very importantly she belongs to an HD family and brings a personal perspective to care.

In the "Recognizing Trigger Behaviors" workshop she first spoke of empathy or the capacity to think and feel the inner life of those who have HD.  It was from this perspective that she talked about irritability in HD:  What it is, why it happens, how it feels for both the HD person and care-partners, how to understand it, and tips to control it.

Posted June 11, 2010 by LaVonne Goodman M.D.

The nocebo effect is the opposite of the placebo effect. Nocebo effects occur when there is a suggested or expected negative medical outcome. The nocebo response can have effects on symptoms: in a study when doctors warned a group of patients that a procedure would be extremely painful, they experienced more pain than the group who were not given this warning. The nocebo response may also have effects on the course of disease: in a study of risk factors for heart disease, a group of women who believed they were prone to heart disease had an increase in death rate due to heart disease, 4 times greater than the group who had all the same risk factors except the belief they were prone to heart disease. Think sick, be sick. Might this effect occur in Huntington's?