What major diseases are associated with the nervous system?
There are a few main types of illness. Firstly those affecting the peripheral nervous system: -Poliomyelitis – destroys motor nerves -Diabetes mellitus – where small blood vessels that supply peripheral nerves are damaged – Shingles – caused by herpes zoster virus, happens when the virus infects sensory nerve cells. V painful – Guillain-Barré syndrome – autoimmune disease (where the body’s own immune system attacks the body) where the sheath around peripheral nerves is destroyed, leading to decreased signal transmission across them. Quite a rare disease, but interesting all the same. I suppose diseases of the CNS could be broken down into subgroups: Degenerative diseases: – Alzheimer’s disease – formation of tangles and plaques in brain nerve cells, resulting in degeneration of many parts of the brain – Parkinson’s disease – degeneration of the pars compacta, a major dopamine-producing region of the brain. The pars compacta controls the basal ganglia, which regulate how much the body m
