According to Israeli scientists, fixing weak electrical currents in a part of the brain can treat Parkinson’s disease.
They say their research, which has been peer-reviewed and published in the journal NJP Parkinson’s Disease, could open up a new approach to fighting the disease and allowing detection when people are young.
A major difficulty in drug development for Parkinson’s is that many scientists consider it a term for multiple diseases with common characteristics, even though it is a single disease.
The genetic mutations underlying Parkinson’s have only been identified in about 15 percent of cases. As a result, scientists are scrambling to find common — or, in medical jargon, convergent — features in the brains of Parkinson’s patients that drugs could target.
dr Shani Stern, a neurologist at the University of Haifa, found in a study that whether or not patients have an identified mutation, they all exhibited a reduction in synaptic currents in certain parts of the brain compared to healthy people. These are specific currents created under synapses, which are conductors between neurons.
Stern and her colleagues wrote in their study that the changes they identified in the brain are “central and convergent to Parkinson’s disease.”
“We discovered mechanisms common to all Parkinson’s cases we studied. These are mechanisms that were not known to be linked to Parkinson’s, and now we have new targets for which future drugs could now be developed that could make them more similar to healthy neurons,” she told The Times of Israel.
Illustrative image: neurons in the human brain (onimate via iStock by Getty Images)
Now that her research has identified the link between synaptic currents and Parkinson’s, she hopes to come up with a new strategy to combat the disease. Drugs could be developed to bring the currents back to normal levels, potentially slowing down or reducing the onset of Parkinson’s by changing them.
The method for the study involved “reprogramming” brain cells into stem cells. The analysis was performed on cells derived from the stem cells. This enabled the scientists to see how the cells behave at different ages, and they made a glaring discovery: the synaptic currents are already reduced in young cells.
dr Shani Stern from the University of Haifa (courtesy of Dr. Shani Stern)
Stern said much more research is needed, but her findings raise the possibility that young people with a family history of Parkinson’s could have cells sequenced to reveal the rates of synaptic currents. People who are likely to develop the disease could potentially be given drugs to slow its development – either existing treatments or those that will come to market in the future.
“Our results imply that the changes in Parkinson’s patients exist long before they are aware of a disease process going on in their brain. If we do this sequencing in a young person and find a similar picture as in people who have Parkinson’s disease, we can assume that person will develop the disease at a later stage,” she said.
“Currently, most treatments are aimed at preventing the disease from getting worse, rather than preventing it. If we can recognize the potential for Parkinson’s disease to develop at an early stage and develop treatments that can halt the progression of the disease, we will be able to start preventative treatment at a stage when neuronal cell mortality is reduced is limited. This allows us to significantly slow down the progression of the disease.”
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