I read a chapter in a new book called Genome about HD, and it was very pessimistic, saying that the discovery of the gene had not got anyone closer to a cure! I think that is untrue, don't you all? The author also said the disease led to total madness. Has anyone experienced this total madness he speaks of? I thought mainly HD's mental problems were depression, anger, and memory loss.

Clearly the author has not familiarized himself with the progress that the HD researchers are making. I think that we have every reason to hope that treatments will be available within the next three years and I even wrote an article about it for HDAC which is in the featured articles archive.

If scientists hadn't isolated the HD gene, they wouldn't have known what causes HD nor the other triplet repeat diseases and they wouldn't have mouse models to study and test possible treatments.

As for the author's assertion of 'total madness' this just isn't true either. While dementia is a possible symptom of HD, not everyone develops this symptom and even if they do, it can usually be treated with medication.

Hi,

At the risk of sounding very clinical, to say HD leads to "total madness" is, ummm, bullshit! Also, it's difficult to make universal statements about memory loss. Most often memory is well-preserved but the processing required to get them expressed is impaired to varying degrees.

How close are we to a cure? No one knows. And no one will...until we have one in hand!

Jim Pollard