Parkinson’s disease is a serious, progressive brain disorder. It affects balance, and speech, and can make your hands shake uncontrollably.
There’s no cure yet, although some drugs can help with the symptoms. Parkinson’s disease starts when nerve cells in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra begin to break down.
This part of the brain is important because it’s where a chemical called dopamine is made. As more and more of these nerve cells die off, less dopamine is made, and the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease get worse.
Hunting for the Cells that Die in Parkinson’s
A team of U.S. researchers decided to get a closer look at the nerve cells in the substantia nigra to figure out which ones die in people with Parkinson’s.
To do this, they used a new technique that can read the genetic code of individual cells.
First, they used this technique to sort the cells in the substantia nigra into 10 different types based on the proteins they were making.
Then, they collected brain samples from 10 people who had Parkinson’s disease or a related condition called Lewy body dementia when they died.
They used the same technique to read the genetic code in the cells from these brain samples. They also looked at brain samples from people who didn’t have Parkinson’s disease.
When they compared the cells from Parkinson’s brains to the cells from the healthy brains, they noticed that one type of cell was less common in Parkinson’s brains.
This suggests that this type of cell might be the one that dies off in people with Parkinson’s disease.
The Next Steps
This discovery is a big step forward in our understanding of Parkinson’s disease.
Knowing which cells die in Parkinson’s disease could help scientists figure out why these cells are dying and how to stop it. This could lead to new treatments for this devastating disease.
However, more research is needed to confirm these findings and to understand why these specific cells are the most affected in people with Parkinson’s disease.
This study is a promising start, but we still have a long way to go in the fight against Parkinson’s disease.
The study was published in Nature Neuroscience. Follow us on Twitter for more articles about this topic.
Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
