Biological mechanism underlying Huntington's disease may be more widespread in the brain than previously thought
In 2025, a team of scientists revealed some unexpected findings about how the inherited DNA repeat associated with Huntington's disease causes the illness—by slowly expanding throughout a person's life, then becoming toxic after enlarging to several times its original length. The findings were in a specific brain region, the striatum, but it wasn't clear if the same process was directly causing…
A recent study has discovered that the biological mechanism behind Huntington's disease may affect a broader range of brain regions than previously believed. In 2025, researchers from the Broad Institute, Harvard Medical School, and McLean Hospital found that the same toxic process triggered by an inherited DNA repeat in the striatum, the brain area most affected by the disease, also occurs in the neocortex.
This suggests that new medicines targeting this mechanism could potentially benefit multiple areas of the brain, addressing both motor and cognitive symptoms of Huntington's disease.
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