This is The Guardian.

Today, finally, a treatment for one of the cruelest diseases.

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You ready then, Josh? Should we do this? Let's do it. This is Josh Holliday. He's the Guardian's North of England editor. My old job. I've known him since he moved up to join my team. We hit it off straightaway. Always the first on the dance floor at the newsroom Christmas parties.

Once we turned up in London with Gallagher Brothers masks and DJed a set of northern classics.

No southern cussies allowed.

But behind the dance moves and the jokes, he had a secret.

I hadn't really told anyone.

Even my best friends didn't know about my dad.

But that was one of the main reasons I wanted to leave London to be closer to my dad. Josh's dad, Phil, has a devastating

neurodegenerative disease, which for the past 17 years has been robbing him of his voice,

his independence and his mobility. And Josh was terrified that he had it too.

Birthdays were always a really tricky time for me.

People celebrate you for that day, but it's a number that's a number that's going up. And for me, since I was 19, it was a number that was potentially getting closer to the end.

You might not have heard of Huntington's.

It's pretty rare.

It's caused by a faulty gene which creates a protein that damages nerve cells in the brain,

...