Neuro-Metabolism-Initiative

The major neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington’s Disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis are associated with striking metabolic abnormalities that manifest themselves early in the disease course at the clinical, cellular and molecular level. While neurodegenerative diseases are traditionally associated with cognitive, psychiatric and movement impairments the metabolic symptoms are relatively underappreciated. From a clinical point of view, unintended weight loss and an impaired glucose metabolism are maybe the most striking of these metabolic abnormalities. Furthermore abnormalities in key metabolic tissues like adipose tissue, skeletal muscle and pancreas are part of the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases. It is still unclear if the metabolic abnormalities, that are associated with neurodegenerative diseases, are primary or secondary to the changes in the brain. In this regard it is of interest that mitochondrial inhibitors that will lead to a changed cellular metabolism are known to induce specific neurodegenerations in animal and humans. This makes it likely that metabolic changes are indeed closely linked to the disease process. It is also not known if targeting the metabolic abnormalities might have an effect on the neuronal degeneration and the disease course. However as a higher BMI at disease onset is very often associated with a slower neurodegenerative disease progression, metabolic interventions might be beneficial for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. The Neuro-Metabolism-Initiative has the goal to link different groups that work on neurodegeneration and/or metabolism with the aim to understand the metabolic changes associated with neurodegenerative diseases and to find new therapeutic strategies for these devastating diseases.