10.7

• MS is often considered to be an autoimmune disorder—a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks part of the body as if it were a foreign substance
• Remyelination refers to the generation of new myelin sheaths on axons—a job taken care of by oligodendroglia in the CNS.
• A major focus of current MS research is the development of treatments that encourage remyelination by oligodendroglia.
• Diagnosing MS is typically done with MRI and it focuses on identifying the time course of development of white-matter lesions.
• loss of motor coordination

  Ataxia
• Epidemiology is the study of the various factors such as diet, geographic location, and age that influence the distribution of a disease in the general population.
• True or False: Genetic factors seem to play significant of a causal role in MS than they do in other neurological disorders.

  False, less of a causal role
• True or False: The incidence of multiple sclerosis is substantially higher in males than in females.

  False, higher in females than in males.
• Which of the following is true about MS?

  • More MS incidents are from Latino Countries
  • higher incidence in people who have lived in cold climates
  • higher incidence in people who have lived in tropical climates

  Higher in people who have lived in cold climates
• Immunomodulatory drugs were approved for the treatment of MS, and a large number of them are now available for MS treatment.
• Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia in the elderly; it currently affects about 50 million people worldwide.
• Alzheimer’s disease is considered to progress through three stages:

  Preclinical

  Prodromal

  Dementia
• The first stage, the preclinical stage, involves pathological changes in the brain without any behavioral or cognitive symptoms.
• The second stage of Alzheimer’s disease, known as the prodromal stage, involves mild cognitive impairment.
• The dementia stage, there is initially a progressive decline in memory, deficits in attention, and personality changes; this is eventually followed by marked confusion, irritability, anxiety, and deterioration of speech.
• True or False: Alzheimer’s disease is a terminal illness.

  True
• three defining neuropathological characteristics of Alzheimer's:

  neurofibrillary tangles

  amyloid plaques

  neuron loss
• Neurofibrillary tangles are threadlike tangles of tau protein in the neural cytoplasm.
• Neurofibrillary tangles are threadlike tangles of tau protein in the neural cytoplasm.
• Tau protein normally plays a role in maintaining the overall structure of neurons.