Could Parkinsons Have A Cure

1 Pages 368 Words

Could there be a Cure for Parkinson’s

The article by Nicholas Wade, “Promising Results Are Seen in Small Parkinson’s Trial”, has a very good explanation on a new experiment tried on five patients to attempt to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a disease that kills neurons that produce dopamine, a nerve-to-nerve messenger. This disease results in bad control of muscles and movements, tremors, spells of rigidity, and even loss of smell and/or taste. For many years doctors have been trying to develop a substance that would counter act the depletion of dopamine in the brain. One of the supplements they came up with was L-dopa, which works very well but with time its effectiveness decreases.
Physicians have tried implanting dopamine-making cells taken from fetuses, but this experiment produced negative results. Then doctors found that it was a hormone that would promote the making of these cells. In past trials thus hormone was injected into the fluid filled in the center of the brain, but this trial resulted in no positive results because the hormone was too large to migrate to where it needed to go in the brain. From this experience Dr. Gill and Dr. Svendsen decided that GDNF should be placed in the part of the patients brain with the largest deficiency in dopamine.
This experiment involves the implantation of small battery operated pumps in the patient’s abdomen. The pump would deliver a “steady trickle of GDNF” that would run through an extremely thin through the body into the putamen. This experiment gave very positive results, with a general improvement in the health of the five patients that were treated in this trial.
This was a very well written article; everything was very well explained, simple and easy to read. This article is very important because there are many people that are affected by this disease. One person that is well known with Parkinson’s is...