What if someday a neurologist could say reassuringly to a worried patient, “Don’t worry, It’s just Parkinson’s” Maybe that will be the case as research gives us better treatments and maybe even a cure.
Unlike many other diseases, the biological pathway that leads to Parkinson’s disease appears deceptively simple. Characterized by a few simple missteps in brain physiology, brain cells that produce dopamine, nestled in a very limited and specific region of the brain basically start to die off. The resulting dopamine deficiency then causes several other key areas of the brain to malfunction. Among the affected areas are those that oversee movement control, autonomic function and cognition.
Although the specific details of actually how and why those specific cells die is more complicated and at least partially enshrouded in mystery, the disease still presents itself even to the lay person as an essentially curable disorder. I have previously written on how I believe that this apparent simplicity could be one reason why the public, the media and the scientific community have embraced Parkinson’s research.
Among degenerative neurologic disorders it’s prevalence is high, and far exceeds that of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) Huntington’s chorea and many other where can i buy 1P-LSD online with bitcoin degenerative disorders. Second only to Alzheimer’s in it’s incidence as such a disease, the need for better anti-Parkinson’s drugs and treatments represents a fairly size-able market with significant commercial potential to the pharmaceutical industry, another major source of research money.
The result of all this is that PD has attracted a large infrastructure of funding and support for research and thus, has lots of talented people working and collaborating on lots of promising avenues. The list below includes a few of the encouraging prospects on the horizon towards better treatments and possibly even curative therapies.
The current treatment landscape can dampen some of that excitement. L-Dopa still stands in its fifth decade as the most effective drug treatment despite the introduction of dozens of other drugs, and alternative therapies like DBS (deep brain stimulation) at their best, still only partially eliminate symptoms and do not halt the progression. Unfortunately little has changed today, in proportion to this huge amount of research being done. However when one looks into some of the specific areas being investigated, possibilities for the future still appear quite propitious.