Consensus paper: Strengths and Weaknesses of Animal Models of Spinocerebellar Ataxias and Their Clinical Implications
Abstrakt
Spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs) represent a large group of hereditary degenerative diseases of the nervous system, in particular the cerebellum, and other systems that manifest with a variety of progressive motor, cognitive and behavioral deficits with the leading symptom of cerebellar ataxia. SCAs often lead to severe impairments of the patient's functioning, quality of life and life expectancy. For SCAs, there are no proven effective pharmacotherapies that improve the symptoms or substantially delay disease progress, i.e. disease modifying therapies. To study SCA pathogenesis and potential therapies, animal models have been widely used and are an essential part of preclinical research. They mainly include mice, but also other vertebrates and invertebrates. Each animal model has its strengths and weaknesses arising from model animal species, type of genetic manipulation and similarity to human diseases. The types of murine and non-murine models of SCAs, their contribution to the investigation of SCA pathogenesis, pathological phenotype, and therapeutic approaches including their advantages and disadvantages are reviewed in this paper. There is a consensus amongst the panel of experts that (1) animal models represent valuable tools to improve our understanding of SCAs, discover and assess novel therapies for this group of neurological disorders characterized by diverse mechanisms and differential degenerative progressions, (2) thorough phenotypic assessment of individual animal models is required for studies addressing therapeutic approaches, (3) comparative studies are needed to bring pre-clinical research closer to clinical trials, and (4) mouse models complement cellular and invertebrate models which remain limited in terms of clinical translation for complex neurological disorders as are SCAs.