Study: Parkinson’s Illness May Progress Silently For Years

Nature Communications, provides fresh insight into the brain’s unexpected resilience during the asymptomatic stage of Parkinson’s disease…

Written by Rivanshi Rakhrai July 19, 2023

Parkinson's disease

Parkinson’s disease can secretly progress for years: Study

Study: Parkinson’s illness can advance over years in silence

According to a mouse study, Parkinson’s may develop slowly but steadily for many years before the neurodegenerative disease is identified. The study, which was just released in the journal Nature Communications, provides fresh insight into the brain’s unexpected resilience during the asymptomatic stage of Parkinson’s disease.

Dopamine is a chemical messenger known for its significance in movement, and researchers from the University of Montreal in Canada have shown that movement circuits in mice’s brains are insensitive to an almost entire absence of active secretion.

Dopamine levels in the brain gradually decline in Parkinson’s disease, they claimed. Louis-Eric Trudeau, a professor at the University of Montreal, said, “This result went against our initial idea, but that’s often the way it is in science, and it forced us to re-evaluate our certainties about what dopamine truly does in the brain.”

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The scientists used genetic engineering to remove the ability of dopamine-producing neurons to produce this chemical messenger in response to these cells’ regular electrical activity. Benoit Delignat-Lavaud, a doctoral student in Trudeau’s group, and the other researchers anticipated that these mice would exhibit a decline in motor performance akin to that observed in people with Parkinson’s disease.

Amazingly, scientists claimed, the mice had a perfectly normal ability to move. Extracellular dopamine levels in the brains of these mice were found to be normal, according to measurements of the brain’s total dopamine levels, the researchers reported. According to their findings, the brain’s movement circuits can function with only modest basal levels of dopamine.

According to the researchers, despite the steady loss of dopamine-producing neurons, baseline dopamine levels in the brain are expected to remain high for many years in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Motor disturbances only manifest when a minimal threshold is exceeded, they claimed. The study may also assist in developing novel strategies to lessen the symptoms of this incurable neurodegenerative disease by pinpointing the systems involved in dopamine secretion in the brain, the researchers said.

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