A few days ago the news emerged that a famous Spanish radio and television presenter, called Josep Lobatoshared a video on Instagram with his progress in recovering the speech he had lost due to a demyelinating disease.
In it you can sense the effort that Lobató must make to pronounce words as simple as “no” and “yes”, something that healthy adults can do automatically, without paying any attention to carrying out the chain of movements necessary to do so.
Naturally, most of the information related to the presenter’s health is confidential, and not much is known about whether Josep Lobató will be able to fully recover his speech or not. However, That does not mean that the viralization of his video has helped many people show him their support and solidarity.to which I join.
So what exactly is a demyelinating disease and why can it cause someone to have trouble speaking? Below I give a brief explanation on the subject, but first it is necessary to know what a substance called myelin.
Myelin is a substance that, by covering the part of nerve cells that elongates to reach distant sites (called axon), makes the interior of the neuron relatively isolated.
And what is the use of this? Basically, the fact that myelin sheaths cover the axon making it look like a string of sausages allows the electrical impulses traveling through it to go much faster. We can imagine it as if wrapping the channel through which the electricity travels would make it more channeled and move only where it can, that is, through the axon and not outside. Thanks to myelin, these nerve impulses do not spread everywhere, losing their potency..
Whether nerve impulses travel slower or faster is not simply a matter of patience; For the brain to function well, many networks of neurons must be synchronized and send massive amounts of information all the time. This means that there are mental processes that can only be carried out if there are many nerve cells functioning at the expected speed, and that if the electrical signals sent by some neurons go much slower, the entire process fails as a whole. Which explains in part what demyelinating diseases are.
Demyelination diseases
A demyelinating disease, as its name suggests, It is characterized by generating a process of demyelination, that is, the destruction of myelin sheaths. that cover part of the neurons.
That does not simply mean that because of this disease we start doing things much more slowly. Although the speed at which nerve impulses travel through neurons seems quantitative, since there are many different speeds, a significant delay in the transmission of signals produces qualitatively different consequences than what would happen without that delay. That is why demyelination is not limited to making us speak more slowly, for example, but can cause us to lose the ability to speak.
The other consequences of demyelination
But the effects produced by a demyelinating disease do not only have to do with speech. Myelin covers the axons of all types of neurons, regardless of whether or not they play a role in speech functioning, and that is why the destruction of myelin sheaths can affect our ability to perform many types of actions.
Some diseases in which demyelination occurs, for example, are Pelizaeus-Merzbacher Disease, in which the symptoms include spasticity, involuntary eye movements or dementia, or leukodystrophies, which are related to appearance of spasms and vision problems, among other ailments. But the best-known demyelinating disease is multiple sclerosis, which affects all types of processes and is very harmful to the entire Central Nervous System in general.
These diseases are one more example that in our mental life not only neurons matter, but there are other elements that interact with them to make everything work as it should.
