Discovery provides model for Alzheimer's breakthrough 25
September 2008 Sydney researchers have made a major breakthrough
that will lead to a greater understanding of the causes of and
treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. At present neither
Alzheimer's disease (AD) nor Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) can
be cured. Therefore, it is important to model the human diseases
in animals to determine what is causing them and to develop a
cure for these debilitating diseases. Exciting new work by Dr
Lars Ittner and Professor Jürgen Götz from the University's
Brain and Mind Research Institute, which is published this week
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, goes
some way to providing an answer to these problems. The paper
describes a novel mouse strain of Pick's disease, a form of
Frontotemporal dementia, which reproduces, for the first time,
Parkinsonism (resting tremor, muscle rigidity, bradykinesia, and
postural instability) in a mouse model. "The mice even show a
reduced footstep length that