Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have made an important discovery that could impact the future treatment of motor neuron disease (MND).

The team has discovered that MND has four distinct patterns of changes in electrical signals that can be identified using EEG. This discovery could help to identify patients for clinical trials and may also play a role in the attempt to find new treatments for the disease.

Over 500 people in Ireland have MND and one person is diagnosed every three days here. The disease causes increasing physical disability, progressive paralysis, cognitive changes and ultimately death within an average of two to three years. There is currently no effective treatment.

Trials of new drugs are being undertaken, however MND is very heterogeneous, with each case having different patterns of disability and life expectancy. It is this difficulty in predicting in advance the patterns of disability and life expectancy that makes designing modern clinical trials so challenging.

However, the electrical signal analysis research developed within TCD has led to the discovery of different patterns of brain network disruption, reflecting the underlying disease process.

The researchers have now shown that these patterns of brain network disruptions in MND cluster into four distinct subtypes that are predictive of how the disease progresses. This brings the researchers one step closer to building better and more effective treatments for different sub-categories of the disease.

"Understanding how brain networking is disrupted in MND has been the focus of our research for the past 10 years. This work shows that we are on the right track and that the technologies we have developed to capture electrical activity in the brain can identify important differences between different patient groups,” explained study supervisor, Dr Bahman Nasseroleslami.

According to professor of neurology and leading MND expert, Prof Orla Hardiman, this is a “very important and exciting body of work”.

“A major barrier to providing the right drug for the right patient in MND is the heterogeneity of the disease. This breakthrough research has shown that it is possible to use patterns of brain network dysfunction to identify subgroups of patients that cannot be distinguished by clinical examination. 

“The implications of this work are enormous, as we will have new and reliable ways to segregate patients based on what is really happening within the nervous system in MND,” she said.

This research has been published in the journal, Brain, and can be viewed here.