It turns out there is a limited set of pathways diseases can take through the brain. When viewed through the lens of their genes, brain diseases fall into some surprising patterns, a new study has found. The study authors say this way of sorting brain diseases and psychiatric disorders could potentially identify new targets for treatments. In the study, published in April in the journal PLOS Biology, scientists sorted 40 different brain diseases and disorders by looking at where genes important to those diseases are switched on, or expressed, in the healthy human brain. The Venn diagram of disease-linked genes and their locales revealed some surprising insights — for example, in this analysis, multiple sclerosis looks a lot like brain cancer.
