Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham have found that inflammation in the brain is present during the early stages of Parkinson’s disease.
The study, recently published online, highlights that this inflammation could be a key player in how the disease starts and progresses. This could offer a new direction for understanding the disease and developing treatments.
The Study Explained
The research team, led by Talene Yacoubian, a professor in the Department of Neurology, enrolled 58 people who were newly diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and 62 people without the disease for comparison.
Yacoubian emphasized that the study focused on people who had just been diagnosed and hadn’t started any Parkinson’s medications yet.
This was crucial to understand if inflammation was naturally occurring in the early stages of the disease.
To look for signs of inflammation in the brain, researchers used a special type of body scanning called PET imaging.
They injected a radioactive molecule into the bloodstream, which then attaches itself to a protein called TSPO found mainly in brain cells responsible for immune responses.
This protein lights up during the scan if there’s inflammation.
What they found was pretty clear: people with early-stage Parkinson’s showed higher levels of this inflammation-marker protein compared to those without the disease.
This suggests that inflammation happens independent of any treatment for Parkinson’s and could be part of the disease from the beginning.
What Does This Mean for the Future?
According to Yacoubian, this is a step forward but there are still many questions to be answered. For instance, does the level of inflammation change as the disease progresses?
Can this inflammation predict how quickly the disease will worsen? To find these answers, the team plans to continue tracking the people in the study for up to five years.
They’ll do follow-up scans and keep an eye on how the disease progresses in each person.
By focusing on the role of inflammation in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, researchers hope to open new paths for treatment and perhaps find a way to slow down or even stop the progression of this challenging disease.
If you care about inflammation, please read studies about the big cause of inflammation in common bowel disease, and vitamin B may help fight COVID-19 and reduce inflammation.
For more information about nutrition, please see recent studies about new way to halt excessive inflammation, and results showing foods that could cause inflammation,
The research findings can be found in Movement Disorders.
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