Huntington’s disease (HD), a fatal, inherited neurodegenerative disorder that causes the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain, is typically diagnosed after symptoms appear in middle age (30s-50s). Many scientists believe that earlier diagnosis could help improve the rigor and outcome of therapeutic interventions, fueling an urgent search for biological markers that can reveal the disease long before symptoms appear. Two University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health professors — Jane Paulsen, professor of neurology, and Michael Newton, chair of biostatistics and medical informatics and professor of statistics in the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences — collaborated to analyze a large dataset from PREDICT-HD, one of the largest studies of early HD ever conducted. Over a period of 15 years, beginning in 2002, PREDICT-HD monitored more than 1,100 people who carry the HD gene but had not yet developed symptoms. Combining clinical expertise in Huntington’s disease with advanced statistical modeling, researchers detected subtle patterns across years of patient data as they compared early biological signals with the later emergence of symptoms in the 250 people who eventually developed the disease. The team identified two proteins that decline as HD develops, a breakthrough that could accelerate the development of treatments and, for people who carry the HD gene, provide a picture of how the disease is progressing so they can weigh treatment options and make life decisions.
Health & Wellness
April 15, 2026
Opening up about farmers’ mental health
A five-year grant from the Wisconsin Partnership Program (WPP), a grantmaking program in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, provided suicide prevention training to farmers and people close to them. The result is the de-stigmatization of a once-taboo subject and a better understanding of how to find help.
