Category: Treatment

  • Muddled Thoughts on a Cure

    I’ve never expected a cure for the SCA3 disease in my lifetime. Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking about it recently, especially in light of citalopram looking promising and some upcoming clinical trials. What are we talking about? Cerebellar degeneration. This is the fundamental issue with having SCA that causes external symptoms of gait ataxia and other…

  • Citalopram and SCA3

    Most technical papers on SCA are more advanced than I can comprehend. Every sentence can be chock-full of references that I don’t fully understand. This article takes an example of what looks like a promising SCA3 study involving drug repurposing and dissects it. Here’s the study, published 2015-09-15: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282042707_Serotonergic_signalling_suppresses_ataxin_3_aggregation_and_neurotoxicity_in_animal_models_of_Machado-Joseph_disease Breaking down the summary Here’s a…

  • Drug Repurposing

    This is an outsider’s view of what drug repurposing is about. When a drug is approved by the FDA, it is approved for a specific purpose. When an FDA-approved drug is used safely for a purpose other than for what it was approved, that is referred to as using it off-label. If a drug is…