April 30th- May 3rd 2010
Thirty-two of the world’s leading scientists and doctors descended on Loutraki, Greece to attend this year’s Nikolas Symposium.
One of the most perplexing questions about LCH is why and how the disease attacks the brain (the Central Nervous System or CNS) and how distressing brain symptoms can be treated.
This year’s conference addressed these difficult questions. Since LCH is so rare and also because it is always difficult to study disease inside the skull, the conference discussed other brain diseases that might throw light on how brain inflammation and damage occurs in LCH.
It is remarkable that infection can take place without any immune response or inflammation. Even more remarkably later inflammation elsewhere in the body can make inflammation in the infected brain occur, leading to brain damage.
Therefore brain damage depends partly on processes occurring in the brain itself but also on events that take place outside the brain, leading to the entry of white blood cells or antibodies into brain tissue. By analogy with other diseases, since LCH attacks particular parts of the brain, it is likely that the targets of the disease are very specific brain molecules or cells.
There was much discussion on how these targets could be identified, as this could lead to new treatments, as it has in other brain diseases.
Professor Peter Beverley