RT Book, Section
A1 Ropper, Allan H.
A1 Samuels, Martin A.
A1 Klein, Joshua P.
A1 Prasad, Sashank
SR Print(0)
ID 1162598066
T1 Degenerative Diseases of the Nervous System
T2 Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology, 11e
YR 2019
FD 2019
PB McGraw-Hill Education
PP New York, NY
SN 9780071842617
LK neurology.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1162598066
RD 2025/01/17
AB The  adjective  degenerative  has  no  great  appeal  to  the  modern  neurologist.  It  implies  an  inexplicable  decline  from  a  previous  level  of  normalcy  to  a  lower  level  of  function—an  ambiguous  conceptualization  of  disease  that  satisfies  neither  a  clinician  nor  a  scientist.  Moreover,  it  gives  no  hint  as  to  the  fundamental  causation  of  a  process  and  in  all  likelihood  combines  a  number  of  mechanisms  under  one  nondescript  term.  It  would  be  tempting  to  attribute  all  progressive  diseases  of  the  nervous  system  that  are  of  unknown  cause  to  degeneration.  The  problem  is  that  many  degenerative  diseases  are  caused  in  a  proportion  of  cases  by  germ  line  genetic  changes.  All  are  currently  called  degenerative,  but  this  nosology  is  a  transitional  method  of  holding  a  place  while  awaiting  more  refined  understanding.