Mild-to-moderate Parkinson’s disease patients who practice Tai Chi were found to experience significant benefits, including better posture, fewer falls, and improved walking ability, researchers from the Oregon Research Institute (ORI) reported in NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine)…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on February 9th, 2012 | No Comments »
Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes, an independent and nonprofit biomedical-research organization, have identified a protein that exacerbates symptoms of Parkinson’s disease - a discovery that could one day lead to new treatments for people who suffer from this devastating neurodegenerative illness…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on January 26th, 2012 | No Comments »
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) are a promising avenue for cell replacement therapy in neurologic diseases. For example, mouse and human iPSCs have been used to generate dopaminergic (DA) neurons that improve symptoms in rat Parkinson’s disease models…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on January 25th, 2012 | No Comments »
Alexithymia, a person’s state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions, has been strongly linked to depression in both clinical and general populations, and even though symptoms of alexithymia and depression can be partially overlapping, they are not all related to depressive symptoms and therefore highlight the relative independence of the two disorders…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on January 25th, 2012 | No Comments »
The accumulation of α-synuclein, a small, negatively charged protein, in neural cells, is one of the hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease. It has been suggested that oligomeric α-synuclein causes membranes to become permeable, or to form channels on the outer cell membrane…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on January 24th, 2012 | No Comments »
Imagine if doctors could spot Parkinson’s disease at its inception and treat the protein that triggers it before the disease can sicken the patient…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on January 24th, 2012 | No Comments »
The pathology of Parkinson’s disease is characterized by a loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the pars compacta of the substantia nigra (SN), an area of the brain associated with motor control, along with the development of α-synuclein (αS) protein in the form of Lewy bodies (LB) in the neurons that survive…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on January 11th, 2012 | No Comments »
A report in the January issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals, reveals that demographics and clinical factors seem to be linked to survival in patients with Parkinson disease (PD), and that the presence of dementia is linked to a substantial increase in mortality…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on January 4th, 2012 | No Comments »
Stabilizing the cell’s power-generating center protects against Parkinson’s disease (PD) in a rat model, according to a report published online this week in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (http://www.jem.org). Mitochondria - the energy production center of cells - are damaged in PD, leading to loss of dopaminergic neurons and degeneration of brain function…
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Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on December 22nd, 2011 | No Comments »
People with Parkinson’s disease swing their arms asymmetrically — one arm swings less than the other - when walking. This unusual movement is easily detected early when drugs and other interventions may help slow the disease, according to Penn State researchers who used inexpensive accelerometers on the arms of Parkinson’s disease patients to measure arm […]
Filed under: Parkinson's Disease on December 18th, 2011 | No Comments »