VIDEO: Better Huntington's awareness can reduce stigma, misperceptions surrounding disease

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Raising awareness about HD and the treatments available that the evolving diagnostic criteria can help in decreasing the stigma surrounding HD, can help with decreasing the misperceptions that many individuals have, misunderstandings about HD and hopefully improve access to care for those that are living with or at risk for HD. We don’t yet have an approved, unfortunately, an approved disease-modifying therapy. However, we do have effective symptomatic therapies for the motor symptoms and many of the non-motor symptoms. And so I think it’s imperative that we continue to raise awareness so that individuals that are symptomatic receive effective treatments. There are pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic therapies available, and so I think it’s, again, important that we continue to have these conversations, to raise awareness and ensure that we are addressing symptoms with or without a clinical diagnosis. If an individual is gene positive or has a family history and they’re struggling with cognitive and psychiatric symptoms, even without significant motor symptoms, I think it’s really important that we talk about these symptoms and use medications and or non-pharmacologic therapies when needed.