Potential Cure for Muscular Dystrophy

This is very good news

Scientists believe they may have found a way to treat muscular dystrophy.

There is currently no cure for the muscle-wasting disease, the most common form of which affects one in every 3,500 children. Most die young. But scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, say they have identified a defect in a key protein which may trigger the disease. Writing in the journal Nature, they said the discovery could lead to new treatments to fight the disease.

Now that would be very good news, wouldn't it? The new research reveals an acetylcholine transporter, which is something they didn't even expect to exist. Acetylcholine is a chemical released by nerve cells to make muscles contract, and like most all signalling chemicals has to be broken down so it won't hang around forever after having completed its job. They used to think it disappeared naturally, being broken down into acetyl and choline for recycling back into more acetylcholine. The new research indicates that there's a protein devoted to breaking it down faster than it normally would, a transport protein, and without this protein it builds up and causes problems. The Amazon poison curare is an acetylcholine blocker, which inhibits your ability to contract any muscles, leading to death, while some nerve agents stop the breakdown of acetylcholine to produce uncontrollable muscle contractions. It's an extremely important chemical.

However, as my friend who works at UCSF says, some "science reporters" know so little about science that what they report is often a rather addled version of what the scientists are trying to explain, so you can get a clearer view by simply going to the source, in this case UCSF's new release. I'd continue blogging on it, but I couldn't write any clearer than the UCSF release, so go give it a quick read. Interesting stuff.