{"id":10448,"date":"2017-01-01T01:50:15","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T01:50:15","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2018-01-22T20:26:32","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T20:26:32","slug":"walking-time-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazines.uthscsa.edu\/mission-old\/walking-time-bomb\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking time bomb"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"elderlyIt\u2019s an unsettling thought: You could be walking around for 20 years developing Parkinson\u2019s disease and not even know it.<\/p>\n

And once symptoms appear, it\u2019s too late for a cure.<\/p>\n

What if a therapy that treats the root causes of Parkinson\u2019s, not just the symptoms, could be started earlier?<\/p>\n

Researchers in the School of Medicine <\/a>are studying changes in Parkinson\u2019s-affected cells at various stages of the disease, long before any symptoms are evident. They describe the changes in the Journal of Neuroscience<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The hope of the research is twofold: gain understandings that can be used to formulate a drug to arrest the disease at a halfway point, and lengthen the time when patients with Parkinson\u2019s can lead healthy, productive lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time, we are getting a look at what\u2019s going on in the time window before the disease visibly takes hold but while changes are occurring,\u201d said study senior author Michael Beckstead<\/a>, Ph.D., assistant professor of physiology and a member of the Barshop Institute for Aging and Longevity Studies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Parkinson\u2019s is marked by the degeneration and death of cells called dopamine neurons. These neurons are found in a brain structure called the substantia nigra. The researchers studied mice in which only these neurons are affected by a genetic mutation.<\/p>\n

In the mice, mitochondrial activity is hampered just in dopamine neurons of the substantia nigra. Mitochondria produce energy for our cells, and since these mice have impaired mitochondria, their dopamine neurons don\u2019t make energy efficiently.<\/p>\n

At first, the mice are completely normal, but as weeks and months go by, the mutation causes their dopamine neurons to slowly become sick and die off.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a progressive model in that these changes don\u2019t take place overnight,\u201d Dr. Beckstead said. \u201cThis makes it like the human disease, which is thought to be somewhere in the range of a 20-year process before symptoms become evident.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the mice, behavioral symptoms such as tremors start to manifest when the mice are about 20 weeks old. The study assessed functional status at time points before that\u2014comparing dopamine neuron function at 6 to 10 weeks of age with function at 11 to 15 weeks of age and function at 16-plus weeks.<\/p>\n

With these comparisons, the researchers constructed a timeline of functional decline in the dopamine neurons. They observed smaller dopamine neurons, reduced communication between the neurons and impaired electrical activity of the neurons.<\/p>\n

\u201cPretty much everything we measured declined in these cells,\u201d Dr. Beckstead said. \u201cIt was really remarkable how everything we studied changed. It was a general decline, and these changes were all occurring before the animals were symptomatic, before you could detect any sort of deficit in their movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

In older mice starting to display the abnormal movements of the disease, the scientists made another observation\u2014heightened gene expression to increase the electrical activity in the dopamine neurons.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a late occurrence in the disease process,\u201d Dr. Beckstead said. \u201cWe believe the cells are trying to compensate for the declining electrical activity. That\u2019s probably how humans are able to be free of symptoms for so long when they have Parkinson\u2019s, even though 30 percent or more of their dopamine neurons have died out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study results aren\u2019t going to translate into a clinical therapy any time soon, but such findings offer the promise that one day the root cause of Parkinson\u2019s may be understood and treated.<\/p>\n

Current treatments for Parkinson\u2019s disease are all symptomatic. They focus on improving the movement deficits and making the patients more comfortable.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have any treatments right now that actually affect the disease process,\u201d Dr. Beckstead said. \u201cThe reason we don\u2019t have any is we don\u2019t understand what\u2019s going on in the early stages of this disease. Studies such as ours will help fill in those knowledge gaps.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s an unsettling thought: You could be walking around for 20 years developing Parkinson\u2019s disease and not even know it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":10592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[207,63],"tags":[99,77,210],"class_list":["post-10448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall16-winter17","category-university-in-motion","tag-barshop","tag-medicine","tag-parkinsons"],"yoast_head":"\nWalking time bomb - Mission magazine | UT Health Science Center San Antonio<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It\u2019s an unsettling thought: You could be walking around for 20 years developing Parkinson\u2019s disease and not even know it.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/magazines.uthscsa.edu\/mission-old\/walking-time-bomb\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Walking time bomb - 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