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Why come to INM?
The sensory and motor disabilities at dawn of the 3rd millennium
Sensory handicaps, i.e. deficiencies which affect audition, vision and somesthesy constitute one of the major causes of morbidity in the industrialized countries (nearly 5 million people in France according to a study in 2000 of the ministry mission for disabling). These handicaps concern all the ages of life, but their incidence increases with age (they then are often cumulated), the more so as life expectancy increases. In our modern world which requires the integrity of our senses and our movements, these handicaps are limiting considerably the autonomy of the elderly. In addition to their social and financial cost, they are badly felt by the patients who have the feeling of a shift between a research which progresses and the applications which are lasting behind.
Technological and medical innovation over the last 30 years, however, allowed considerable progress in the treatments of the sensory and motor affections. Thus, surgery and laser now save vision to many patients when the disease is related to cataract, retinal detachment, and even to myopia. The cochlear implant allows young profoundly deaf children, who would have remained before in a painful dumbness, factor of social rupture, to speak normally. But sensory cells of the eye and of the ear, just as the neurons which connect them to the brain or as those which run the spinal cord or innervate our muscles, are likely to be destroyed by varied processes, which can be of genetic, inflammatory, traumatic or toxic origins. The loss in these nervous elements, whatever the cause, leads to handicaps (blindness, deafness, paralysis) for the moment incurable.
It is thus for the purpose of understanding, preventing and treating these diseases that the Institute for Neurosciences of Montpellier was created, since their eradication is one of the major stakes of health in our developed countries. The INM was at first a beautiful hospital building at the end of the XIX century, taken recently by INSERM to make a modern institute of research. The INM has top equipments to explore life in real time, and to visualize the activity of our cells from the molecular scale to integrated systems. These tools are essential to approach the mechanisms of diseases, and to apply treatments on the basis of this knowledge, from animal to the bed of the patient. Clinical trials are performed in collaboration with the Regional Institute of Biotherapy, the Clinical Center of Investigation and the department of neurology, ophthalmology and ENT, all located on the hospital campus Saint Eloi.
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