Demyelination and associated diseases

A few days ago the news broke that a famous Spanish radio and television presenter, named Josep Lobató, shared on Instagram a video with his progress in regaining the speech that he had lost due to a demyelinating disease.

In it you can intuit the effort that Lobató must make to pronounce words as simple as "no" and "yes", something that healthy adults can do it automatically, without paying any attention to the performance of the chain of movements necessary to do it.

Naturally, most of the presenter's health-related information is confidential, and neither is much known about whether Josep Lobató will be able to fully recover the speak or not. However, That does not mean that the viralization of his video has served so that many people show their support and solidarity, to which I join.

To all this... what exactly is a demyelinating disease and why can it cause someone to have trouble speaking? Below I give a brief explanation on the subject, but first it is necessary to know what a substance called myelin.

What is myelin?

Myelin It is a substance that, by covering the part of the nerve cells that lengthens to reach distant sites (called the axon), makes the interior of the neuron relatively isolated.

And what is the use of this? Basically, the fact that the myelin sheaths cover the axon making it look like a string of sausages allows the electrical impulses that travel through it to go much faster. We can imagine it as if wrapping the channel through which the electricity travels would make it stay more channeled and move only where it can, that is, through the axon and not outside. Thanks to myelin these nerve impulses are not scattered everywhere, losing their potency.

Whether nerve impulses travel slower or faster is not simply a matter of patience; so that the brain works well it is necessary that many networks of neurons are synchronized and are sending massive amounts of information all the time. That means that there are mental processes that can only be carried out if there are many nerve cells running at speed. expected, and that if the electrical signals sent by some neurons go much slower, the whole process fails in its globality. Which explains in part what demyelinating diseases are.

Diseases of demyelination

A demyelinating disease, as its name suggests, It is characterized by generating a demyelination process, that is, the destruction of the myelin sheaths that cover part of the neurons.

That does not simply mean that because of this disease we start to do things in a much slower way. Although the speed at which nerve impulses travel through neurons seems somewhat quantitative, since there are many speeds different, a significant delay in the transmission of signals produces qualitatively different consequences than what would happen without that signal. delay. That is why demyelination is not limited to making us speak more slowly, for example, but rather can cause us to lose the ability to speak.

The other consequences of demyelination

But the effects of a demyelinating disease are not just about speech. Myelin covers the axons of all types of neurons, regardless of whether or not they have a role in the functioning of the brain. speaks, and so the destruction of the myelin sheaths can be noted in our ability to perform many types of Actions.

Some diseases in which demyelination occurs, for example, are Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, in which symptoms include spasticity, involuntary eye movements, or dementia, or leukodystrophies, which are related to the appearance of spasms and vision problems, among other ailments. But the most well-known demyelinating disease is multiple sclerosis, which affects all types of processes by and is very harmful to the entire Central and general Nervous System.

These diseases are one more example that in our mental life not only the neurons matter, but there are other elements that interact with them to make everything work as it should.