POSTED BY: ADMIN | OCTOBER 15, 2015
University of Florida researchers have identified a biomarker
that shows the progression of Parkinson’s disease in the brain.
Scientists believe the marker will aid in diagnosis and lead to
improved treatment of the degenerative disease.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers compared brain images
of Parkinson’s patients to those of a control group for over a year. They found
that an area of the brain called the substania nigra changes as the disease
advances.
The
findings provide the first MRI-based method to measure the disease’s progression,
which can inform treatment decisions and aid in identifying new therapies, said
University of Florida applied physiology and kinesiology professor David
Vaillancourt, Ph.D., one of the study’s authors.
The Parkinson’s drugs available today help reduce symptoms. They
don’t slow the progression of the disease, which is the major unmet medical
need,” Vaillancourt said.
“We’ve provided a tool to test promising new therapies that
could address progression.”
The substania nigra of a Parkinson’s patient has more “free
water,” fluid unconstrained by brain tissue, likely because of disease-related
degeneration.
The
new study published in the journal Brain uses diffusion imaging, a type
of MRI, to show that free-water levels increase as the disease progresses. The
free-water level was also a good predictor of how bradykinesia — the
slowness of movement common to Parkinson’s — advanced over the course of
the subsequent year.
Because
doctors typically diagnose the disease by evaluating patients’ symptoms and how
they respond to medication, the indicator could also be useful to distinguish
Parkinson’s from similar disorders. That could lead to better clinical trials,
Vaillancourt said.
http://healthpassion.info/new-biomarker-may-improve-parkinsons-treatment/
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