Hi listfriends,
the following article was send to me by a friend :
Parkinson's disease cure may lie in transplants
BOSTON (Reuters) - Scientists say they have been able to reverse the
effects of Parkinson's disease in laboratory rats by transplanting tissue
from their rodents' necks into theirbrains.
The findings, reported in Friday's edition of the medical journal
Neuron, need to be confirmed and the scope of the work expanded before it
is applied to humans.
The rats were tested only for three months and the researchers from
the University of Sevilla in Spain used a chemically induced model of
Parkinson's disease that may have important differences from the condition
that strikes 50,000Americans each year.
Their work is expected to open new avenues to explore in the treatment
of a now-incurable disease that causes debilitating weakness, stiffness and
muscle tremors.
Doctors have tried to treat Parkinson's by stimulating the production
of a chemical in the brain known as dopamine by injecting either a drug or
dopamine-producing cells from fetal brain tissue. The drug's potency wanes
and has serious side effects; the large number of fetal brain cells needed
makes that
method impractical as a routine treatment.
But the researchers, headed by Emilio F. Espejo, turned to small
nodules in the neck known as carotid bodies that usually measure oxygen
and carbon dioxide levels in the blood. When starved of oxygen, the cells
start pumping out dopamine. Tissue transplanted into the brain is also
starved of oxygen.
Espejo and his colleagues wanted to see if carotid body tissue
transplanted into the brain could supply the missingdopamine. First, they
created a Parkinson-like condition in rats, then they injected carotid body
cells into the brain. The afflicted rats who received the transplants
showed obvious improvement 10 days after surgery and kept improving.
``Most behavioral parameters recovered completely within the first
month of grafting and remained stable, or even improved, throughout the
study,'' Espejo's team reported.
The problem of rejection that usually occurs in conventional
transplants would be eliminated because the transplanted tissue would come
from the patient.
In a commentary in the medical journal, Arnon Rosenthal of Genentech
Inc., cautioned that many more questions need to be answered before the
treatment is tried in humans.
``Carotid body transplants have been tried before but with less
success,'' he said. The difference may be the way the Espejo team prepared
the cells.
^REUTERS@
