Levodopa tagged posts

Finger Wrap uses Sweat to provide Health Monitoring at your Fingertips

This finger wrap is powered by the wearer’s fingertip sweat—and also monitors levels of glucose, lactate, vitamin C and levodopa in that same sweat. Credit: Shichao Ding

A sweat-powered wearable has the potential to make continuous, personalized health monitoring as effortless as wearing a Band-Aid. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an electronic finger wrap that monitors vital chemical levels—such as glucose, vitamins, and even drugs—present in the same fingertip sweat from which it derives its energy.

The advance was published Sept. 3 in Nature Electronics by the research group of Joseph Wang, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at UC San Diego.

The device, which wraps snugly around the fin...

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Sonic Hedgehog Protein Pathway Stimulation could help Parkinson’s Patients

A new study from Malave et al. suggests that in the brains of L-Dopa-treated Parkinson’s patients the lack of Shh signaling to cholinergic neurons results in L-Dopa induced dyskinesia. Image credit: Santiago Uribe-Cano

Levodopa, or L-dopa, is considered the most effective treatment for Parkinson’s disease today. After a few years of treatment, however, almost all patients develop a debilitating side-effect called L-dopa induced dyskinesia, or LID, which causes involuntary movements in the limbs, face, and torso. Deep brain stimulation can alleviate LID, but the procedure is highly invasive and not all patients are eligible.

Now, a new study led by researchers at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the CUNY School of Medicine shows that drugs that increased signaling by a protein called ...

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