It's about time: could early changes be the key to intervention for neurodegenerative disease?

During this talk, Dr Beccano-Kelly describes his research which uses stem cells as a model system for PD to understand when changes leading to PD occur and how this information can be used to find a window where current treatments would be most effective.
As ageing populations increase across the UK and Europe, the rates of age-related neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and Alzheimer’s Disease are set to rise substantially.
All neurodegenerative diseases primarily affect the neurons, or cells, in the human brain. Unlike other cells in the body, neuronal cells normally don’t reproduce or replace themselves when they become damaged or die. This currently makes these conditions incurable and difficult to treat. Identification of the early changes that occur in neuronal cells during the development of disease could allow treatment optimisation to delay the onset cell death and symptoms of disease.