Professor Matthew Kiernan

There'll be a chest infection.

You'll die from pneumonia.

So you die from pneumonia.

That's the most common.

But alternatively, it also does control your heart, your heart rhythm.

People have heart attack.

They just die in their sleep.

So the brain is controlling all of these functions.

But yeah, that's how you die.

Yeah, well, just to put it into a bit of perspective, so motor neurone disease is a neurodegenerative condition, and neurodegeneration incorporates dementia, and dementia is due to, say, Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia that we've talked about.

Yeah.

Motor neuron disease is due to a protein abnormality in the brain as well called TDP43.

It tends to affect particularly the motor pathway, so the corticospinal tract, which is a tract that goes through the brain and spinal cord and controls all of our voluntary muscles.

So the motor neuron itself is one of the biggest cells in the body.

Sometimes it's up to 1.4 meters long and has huge metabolic... What?

1. what?

1.4 meters.

It's huge.

That's massive.

Massive.