Many of you have probably done the ALS ice bucket challenge and nominated your friends as a way to spread awareness for this disease. Well I’m proud to inform you that it worked, people are paying attention! So what exactly is ALS, what have we discovered about it, what in the world is memantine and why did I just nominate you to dump it on your head? ALS is a rather nasty disease that causes the destruction of neurons within the spine and parts of the brain. This destruction leads to muscle spasms and weakness that progresses to complete muscle paralysis and eventually death. So what is causing the destruction of neurons? It turns out too much glutamate within the nervous system is activating processes that create an influx of calcium into neurons causing the death of them. So remove all the glutamate and problem solved right? Wrong, we need glutamate for many aspects of regular neuron activity, so we need to find another method of controlling ALS. That’s where memantine comes into play. No I don’t want you to actually dump it on your head, it has a much more practical purpose. Pharmacological treatments use memantine as a low-affinity, non-competative NMDAR antagonist to combat neuron degeneration in ALS studies. That last sentence was a mouthful right? It also may have left you more confused than when we started. Well lets break this sentence down a little. NMDAR is a protein that is activated by glutamate and allows calcium to enter the neuron, which is the main issue occurring in ALS. What this sentence is telling us is scientist have been using a drug named memantine to stop the activity of the protein NMDAR. Memantine essentially plugs this protein like a cork and stops calcium from entering the neuron. So it looks like we just cured ALS and can add one more point to scientific achievement! Well as you may have guessed diseases of the brain are never that simple and we still have a ways to go. We are moving in the right direction though and are making huge steps to understanding ALS and how to cure it. So my challenge to you is to keep spreading awareness and nominate all your facebook friends to do the ALS ice bucket challenge. The attention this is creating for ALS is already producing results.
ALS Challenge: I Nominate You to Dump Memantine on Your Head?
