Researchers Broaden the Attack on Parkinson's Disease

摘要

Because there is no cure for Parkinson's disease and no therapy that is effective in the long term, researchers are urgently seeking better treatments. Among the treatments now being investigated, the most controversial seeks to replace the brain neurons that die in Parkinson's disease with transplants of fetal tissue. The treatment shows promise, but it is fraught with political and ethical problems because of its dependence on the use of aborted human fetuses. But four papers published this month suggest that the search for new treatments is broadening out. Two of the papers suggest ways to improve the neuron transplants or make them independent of the availability of fresh fetuses; the other two take an entirely different tack, suggesting that itmight be possible to prevent the neurons at risk in Parkinson's from dying by injecting a growth factor into patients' brains. "It is difficult at this point to guess which [of these therapeutic strategies] will eventually turn out to be the-most efficient," says neural graft pioneer Anders Bjorklund of the University of Lund, Sweden. "But one should expect that there will be very interesting developments along these lines in the next few years."