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Wednesday December 31 12:24 PM EST Mental Exercise May Help Parkinson's NEW YORK (Reuters) -- A program of mental training may one day improve how people with Parkinson's disease respond to drugs, experiments with laboratory rats suggest. The study also supplies more evidence that lifestyle can influence the risk of developing neurological disorders. "Several studies have hinted that the more education you have, the less likely you are to get Alzheimer's or Parkinson's," said Dr. Richard E. Tessel, professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. "Our studies hint that exercising your brain every day may be just as important as 20 minutes of physical exercise," said Tessel in a statement released by the university. In humans, the lack of the neurotransmitter dopamine in parts of the brain that control and coordinate movement causes Parkinson's symptoms, such as tremor, rigidity, poor balance and coordination. Tessel's studies involved rats with experimentally-induced Parkinson's disease. In these animals, most of the brain cells responsible for making dopamine were destroyed. Some of the animals with Parkinson's were then trained to push various levers in different sequences to obtain a food reward. Other rats -- some with Parkinson's, some healthy -- received no training. After all the rats in the study were given a dopamine-like drug, apomorphine, the researchers found that the trained animals with Parkinson's showed little change in their behavior, similar to the healthy rats. But the untrained animals with induced Parkinson's became highly excited and very active -- suggesting that training influenced the effects of the drug in Parkinson's animals. The researcher theorizes that the training regimen increased dopamine's availability in the brains of the trained Parkinson's rats. If future studies find similar results in humans, the researchers believe that mental training could help reduce the need for drugs or surgery in these patients. ------------------------------------------------------------------------