23 April 2012
19th Century Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease May Help Patients Today
In the 19th century, the celebrated neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, developed a “vibration chair” to relieve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. He reported improvements in his patients, but he died shortly thereafter and a more complete evaluation of the therapy was never conducted. Now a group of scientists at Rush University Medical Center have replicated his work, and they report that while vibration therapy does significantly improve some symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, the effect is due to placebo or other nonspecific factors, and not the vibration. Their study is published in the April issue of Journal of Parkinson’s Disease.
17 April 2012
New Findings and Imaging Techniques May Aid Diagnosis of Concomitant Alzheimer’s in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease Dementia
Dementia is a frequent complication of Parkinson’s disease (PD), but it is clinically impossible to distinguish PD dementia (PDD), which develops from the progression of the Lewy body pathology that underlies PD, from PD with coexistent Alzheimer’s disease (PDAD). Both have similar characteristics. A team of scientists has found that PDAD patients have much denser accumulations of amyloid plaques in the striatal area of the brain than PDD patients. The results suggest that recently developed imaging techniques may be able to identify striatal amyloid plaques in the living brain and could be useful for distinguishing PDD from PDAD. Their results are published in the April issue of the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease.
24 January 2012
Scientists Report First Step in Strategy for Cell Replacement Therapy in Parkinson’s Disease
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) are a promising avenue for cell replacement therapy in neurologic diseases. For example, mouse and human iPSCs have been used to generate dopaminergic (DA) neurons that improve symptoms in rat Parkinson’s disease models. Reporting in the current issue of the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, a group of scientists from Japan evaluated the growth, differentiation, and function of human-derived iPSC-derived neural progenitor cells (NPCs) in a primate model, elucidating their therapeutic potential.
