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Judgment Task, Called Reversal Learning, Diminishes as Huntington’s Advances, Study Suggests

The ability to apply reversal learning, which involves adapting behavior according to changes in stimulus-reward situations, appears to be diminished in patients with Huntington’s disease and to worsen as the disease progresses, according to new research. This study, “Reversal Learning Reveals Cognitive Deficits And Altered Prediction Error Encoding In The Ventral Striatum…

Numerous DNA Repeats Seen in Huntington’s May be Result of Gene Repair Effort

Researchers may finally have tracked down an explanation for expansions of three-letter DNA sequences that disrupt genes, and lead to Huntington’s disease and numerous other neuromuscular and neurodegenerative conditions. The study, “The role of break-induced replication in large-scale expansions of (CAG)n/(CTG)n repeats,” published in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular…

Huntington’s Patients’ Inability to Recognize Facial Emotions May Be Due to Multi-brain-area Dysfunction, Study Says

Huntington’s disease patients’ inability to recognize people’s emotions from their facial expressions appears to be linked to dysfunction in more than one area of the brain, according to a study. The brain areas include “emotion–related regions, such as front-striatal networks and limbic areas, and regions associated with visual processing,” according…