News

A specific mutation commonly found in Parkinson’s patients has been shown to enhance the expression of α-synuclein (SNCA), a key gene involved in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease. These findings were published in Nature, in the study “Parkinson-associated risk variant in distal enhancer of α-synuclein modulates target gene expression.” Genome-wide association studies…

Trequant, Inc., a wearable device startup, is launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to market and further develop its tremor quantifying device. The Trequant wearable is designed to appear and feel like a normal analog watch, but contains advanced sensors that monitor the extremity tremors common to movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease…

Inhibitors of the JAK/STAT pathway may provide potential for treating patients with neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Parkinson’s, by reducing the degenerative inflammation in the brain according to the study “Inhibition of the JAK/STAT pathway protects against α-synuclein-induced neuroinflammation and dopaminergic neurodegeneration“, published May 4 in The…

A completely new preclinical technique developed by researchers at Lund University in Sweden involves analysis of tissue from patients to show exactly what happens in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients who have nerve function restored as a result of nerve cell transplants. The scientists have also identified the reason why…

Analysis of a Parkinson’s patient has yielded the first evidence that transplanted nerve cells can survive and function in diseased human brains for almost 25 years. The finding was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), in the study, “…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved for the first time a drug to treat the hallucinations and delusions associated with Parkinson’s disease psychosis (PDP). The drug, Nuplazid (pimavanserin), produced by Acadia Pharmaceuticals, had been designated a Breakthrough Therapy by the FDA in 2014. “Today’s approval of NUPLAZID represents a…

Therapies intending to increase dopamine levels in the brains of Parkinson’s patients have struggled to adequately regulate signaling. But researchers have now engineered transplant dopamine neurons that might be switched on or off using designer drugs — suggesting these transplants might be a viable way of treating Parkinson’s via dopamine release after…

University of Texas Health Science Center researchers have identified physiologic changes in dopamine neurons in a key animal model of Parkinson’s known to display disease symptoms, the MitoPark mouse model. The dopamine changes in the mice, however, clearly came before any symptoms appeared — findings that may lead to earlier identification of  Parkinson’s in people,…

An innovative new motion monitoring tool that resembles a wristwatch could soon improve quality of life and treatment effectiveness for people with Parkinson’s disease by better informing the neurologists who are treating them. A research team at Cedars-Sinai medical center in Los Angeles, California, is one…

Important findings linking the protein Connexin 36 with the disrupted communication between nerve cells in Parkinson’s patients may contribute to a better understanding of the disease. The study was developed by Bettina Schwab, a former Ph.D. student at The Netherlands’ University of Twente Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer…