What is the biggest challenge in neurology today?

One challenge in neurology today is that we have many medications to treat symptoms of disorders, but nothing to stop the disease process. Stephen Sergay, MD, clinical neurologist, explains what we need to work toward.

Transcript

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STEPHEN SERGAY: The number one challenge might be processed drugs. And what I mean by that is that we have symptom medication

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for many, many illnesses. But we have very few medications that might stop the disease process.

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For example, diabetes is managed by giving the person insulin, but that doesn't stop the disease. We can manage epilepsy with antiepileptic drugs,

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but it would be wonderful if we had a drug that actually turned off the ability of the brain to have a seizure.

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In some ways, we've almost accomplished that with MS, in that MS used to be a diagnosis that

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carries with it a high likelihood of being a progressive disorder. And though it still does have that,

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the preventive drugs that we have available at this point reduce the number of attacks quite substantially

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and therefore also reduce residual disability or the occurrence of disability as the years go by.

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So generally speaking, in Parkinson's, we'd love to have a drug that prevents progression of the disorder.

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In migraine, we'd like to give people medication that actually stops people having migraine. So those processed drugs, from my perspective,

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are exactly what we need across the field. [AUDIO LOGO]