Parkinson’s disease tagged posts

Taking a particular type of medication to treat enlarged prostate is associated with a reduced risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, according to a large observational study led by researchers at the University of Iowa, with colleagues in Denmark and China.

The findings, published Feb. 1 in JAMA Neurology, provide compelling evidence that terazosin, and similar medications, might have the potential to prevent or delay the development of Parkinson’s disease.

The new study used data on almost 300,000 older men from two large, independent patient datasets — the Truven Health Analytics MarketScan database in the Uni...

Scientists have produced a tomato enriched in the Parkinson’s disease drug L-DOPA in what could become a new, affordable source of one of the world’s essential medicines.

The development of the genetically modified (GM) tomato has implications for developing nations where access to pharmaceutical drugs is restricted.

This novel use of tomato plants as a natural source of L-DOPA also offers benefits for people who suffer adverse effects — including nausea and behavioral complications — of chemically synthesised L-DOPA .

Tomato — was chosen as a widely cultivated crop that can be used for scaled up production a...

Researchers have discovered that a single treatment to inhibit a gene called PTB in mice converts native astrocytes, brain support cells, into neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. As a result, the mice’s Parkinson’s disease symptoms disappear.

Xiang-Dong Fu, PhD, has never been more excited about something in his entire career. He has long studied the basic biology of RNA, a genetic cousin of DNA, and the proteins that bind it. But a single discovery has launched Fu into a completely new field: neuroscience.

For decades, Fu and his team at University of California San Diego School of Medicine studied a pr...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of North Carolina in the USA have mapped out the cell types behind various brain disorders. The findings are published in Nature Genetics and offer a roadmap for the development of new therapies to target neurological and psychiatric disorders. One interesting finding was that cells from the gut’s nervous system are involved in Parkinson’s disease, indicating that the disease may start there.

The nervous system is composed of hundreds of different cell types with very different functions...