Parkinson’s disease is a common illness that affects a lot of people.
Some brain doctors at the Catholic University in Rome think that heavy exercise might be able to help slow it down.
They believe this could lead to new treatments that don’t involve drugs.
To understand if their idea was right, these brain doctors did an experiment. They made some lab animals do a lot of running on a treadmill for four weeks.
These animals were like those who are in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. They noticed that the animals started producing a special growth thing called BDNF when they exercised.
The Surprising Results
The brain doctors saw that this BDNF helped the brain a lot. They found that the exercise helped keep more brain cells alive, made the brain more flexible, and helped the animals move better and understand space better.
In the animals that exercised, the disease didn’t spread as quickly. It didn’t harm certain areas of the brain that are important for movement as much.
Also, the brain cells that make dopamine, an important signal substance, stayed healthier.
What This Means for Parkinson’s Disease
All these things are important because people with Parkinson’s disease have problems with movement and understanding space.
They also have less dopamine in their brain. But the animals that exercised did better in all these areas.
What’s more, the effects lasted even after the animals stopped exercising.
The brain doctors think this might be because BDNF worked together with another brain substance, the NMDA receptor, to keep brain cells healthy and responding to signals properly.
What Comes Next: From Lab to Patients
The next step is to see if these findings can help people with Parkinson’s disease. To do this, they are now doing an exercise study with real patients.
They want to see if exercise can slow down the disease in people and change how it progresses.
Since Parkinson’s disease also involves inflammation and immune responses in the brain, they also want to study brain cells that help support other cells and their environment.
They want to find out more about how exercise affects these cells and slows down the disease.
A New Hope
Parkinson’s disease is a tough illness that affects a lot of people. But these brain doctors from Rome have given us new hope. Exercise might be a powerful tool to fight this disease.
They have shown this in the lab, and now they’re studying real patients. We’ll have to wait and see what they find. But it’s clear that exercise could be a big part of future treatments for Parkinson’s disease.
If you care about Parkinson’s disease, please read studies that Vitamin E may help prevent Parkinson’s, and Vitamin D could benefit people with Parkinson’s.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about new ways to treat Parkinson’s disease, and results showing flavonoid-rich foods could improve survival in Parkinson’s disease.
The study was published in Science Advances.
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