{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02268308489954634, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0012961762799740765, 'mean_word_length': 5.151394422310757, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Huntington's Disease Alters Human Development in the Fetal Stage

Teams of French researchers have found cellular changes that alter cortical development in the brains of human fetuses who carry the mutant huntingtin gene (mHTT) implicated in Huntington’s disease (HD). The finding adds a new wrinkle to the puzzle of HD as many people who carry the mutation can live healthy lives for four decades or longer before the onset of symptoms. No one knows why, but this is a common thread in other late-onset geneticallydriven neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, the researchers said. And a growing number of researchers believe that it is best to treat people with the HD mutation as early as possible.Now, findings from this study, published online July 16 in Science, beg the question: How early? The researchers, led by Sandrine Humbert, PhD, research director of INSERM (the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research) and group leader at the Grenoble Institut des Neurosciences, and Alexandra Durr, MD, PhD, professor at Sorbonne University and team leader of the Paris Brain Institute at Pitie-Salpêtrière Hospital, had access to fetal tissue from families that terminated their pregnancy in the context of a prenatal test. The developing fetus carried the mHTT. Other mouse and neuroimaging studies with pre-manifest mutation carriers have suggested that the mutation might affect neurodevelopment but this is the first time that scientists have looked to the human fetus to know for sure.