Editorial: Molecular Diagnostics in the Detection of Neurodegenerative Disorders

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Molecular Diagnostics and Therapeutics, a section of the journal Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences Editorial on the Research Topic Molecular Diagnostics in the Detection of Neurodegenerative Disorders Neurodegenerative disorders encompass a range of medical conditions which primarily affect the neurons in the human brains. Such conditions result in the disorders of the central nervous system which eventually lead to the progressive loss of neural tissues including death of neurons (Agrawal and Biswas, 2015). An impressive volume of research has been conducted over the last few decades to advance our understanding of this fatal disease. The challenge to treat neurodegenerative disorders lies in the inability of the neurons to regenerate on their own once they start functioning abnormally after the neural deterioration or once a severe damage occurs to a neural tissue. However, stem cell therapy has been proven to be potentially useful in neuroregeneration or even neuronal cell replacement (Chung et al., 2002; Rachakonda et al., 2004). One of the most important missions of diagnosis and prognosis of neurodegeneration is the ability of early detection of the onset of neurodegeneration. An early diagnosis of the disease is critical as it provides a chance for an early treatment that may be helpful to prevent further progression of the deadly neurodegeneration and its aftermaths that takes millions of lives every year globally (Miller and O'Callaghan, 2015). With an aim to provide a discussion platform to neurologists, neuroscientists and pathologists for sharing the latest findings and knowledge on neurodegeneration and the molecular diagnostics to detect and combat neurodegeneration, we have launched this special research topic on molecular diagnostics in the detection of neurodegenerative disorders. We anticipate that molecular diagnostics will play an imperative role in near future for providing an effective diagnostic solution to the complex problem of neurodegenerative diseases. Based on the available research data, we firmly believe that molecular diagnostics can be effective to detect and diagnose various neurological diseases such as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington's, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's disease, at an early stage (Gasser et al., 2001a,b, 2003; Agrawal and Biswas, 2015). Molecular diagnostics in neurodegenerative disorder is an emergent area of study, research and development. It represents a multidisciplinary research field that offers plenty of opportunities for collaboration between neurologists, psychologists, biologist and biomaterials scientists and other trained personnel with the necessary experience in managing the diseases. We expect that further developments in …