Five Deadly Diseases Explained
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After surveying dozens neuroscientists, epidemiologists, and psychiatrists, scientists were able to decide on the top five most harmful and debilitating diseases to the brain; depression, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and autism. After doing extensive research on each disease, they hope to use the research learn how to prevent and treat these diseases as well as use them to better understand the way that the brain functions and controls the body.
This article explores not only what goes wrong in the brain when these diseases occur, but it compares the treatments practiced by doctors today to the methods that will be used in the future. Scientists have recently discovered interesting techniques for helping patients, such as “injecting genes directly into the brain” to help with Parkinson’s tremors, using bat saliva as a safe compound “to bust up blood clots” that cause strokes, and using an “implantable” form of electric shock therapy to awaken a patient from a vegetative state. Because scientists now are only soothing symptoms of the diseases, their goal now is to “map out the inner workings of the brain and correct the fundamental causes of each affliction.” In this article all the major questions about each disease are addressed, including what goes wrong in the brain that cause the disease, how many people are affected by it, what the methods of treatment are today, and what doctors and scientists hope to prescribe in the future.
Because the article gives hope for future treatments of the most harmful and common diseases, it appeals to people who are affected by these diseases. The treatment’s promise varies according to how much the doctors know about each disease. In some cases like in Parkinson’s disease, there is no cure. However, there are some new experimental options for the management of the symptoms of this disease including gene therapy. Gene therapy is a relatively new branch of science with many applications, so the information in this article would appeal also to scientists in this field. In autism, like in Parkinson’s, there is no cure.