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Environmental factors such as long-term stress, chronic inflammation and exposure to toxins may play a key role in causing Parkinson's disease, even in people without a genetic risk, a Canadian study has found.
A team from McGill University in Montreal published an article last month Nature Neuroscience which may have uncovered a new link between the immune system and the development of Parkinson's disease.
The researchers found that an immune response plays a crucial role in forming toxic protein clumps, known as Lewy bodies, in brain cells, contributing to the progression of the disease.
“Our findings suggest that anyone can develop Parkinson's disease if exposed to the right environment, and so a genetic predisposition to disease may not be necessary,” said senior author Peter McPherson, professor of neurology and neurosurgery and anatomy and cell biology at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital. .
“This marks an important step forward in understanding key aspects of Parkinson's and other neurological diseases,” he said in a statement Friday press release.
Parkinson's disease is a progressive neurological disorder that affects movement and often causes tremors, stiffness, and problems with balance and coordination. It's also the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world, and that's likely due to an aging population and better tools to diagnose disease, explains Angelica Asis, vice-president of research at Parkinson Canada.
“There are the movement symptoms associated with Parkinson's. So the shaking of the hands, the stiffness and some slowness of movement,” she told Global News. “But [symptoms also] include constipation, cognitive problems such as problems with multitasking and brain fog, sleep problems, hallucinations and depression.”
More than 100,000 Canadians live with Parkinson's and another 30 are diagnosed every day. As the population ages, the incidence of Parkinson's is expected to rise, and by 2034, 150,048 Canadians are expected to have Parkinson's, she added.
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The disease happens when certain brain cells called dopamine-producing neurons become damaged and die. These cells are crucial for smooth movement and coordination and when they are lost, it leads to tremors, stiffness and movement problems, which are common symptoms of Parkinson's.
The exact reason behind this is still not known, but researchers think it is a combination of genetic and environmental factors, such as pesticides, air pollution and industrial chemicals.
There is currently no cure, but there is one treatment availableknown as dopamine replacement therapy. However, Asis said there is no approved therapy to slow or stop the neurodegenerative process.
That's why McGill University researchers hope their findings will help pave the way for future treatments.
Lewy bodies are abnormal protein clumps found in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease. Until now, however, they could only be studied in human neurons after death, limiting researchers' ability to fully understand their role in the disease, the study said.
For the first time, the researchers were able to create laboratory-grown Lewy bodies in human neurons derived from stem cells. They found that a combination of α-synuclein and immune activation was crucial for its formation, specifically targeting dopamine-producing neurons (the brain cells affected in Parkinson's).
This suggests that factors that activate the immune system, such as chronic inflammation, exposure to toxins or long-term stress, may not only correlate with Parkinson's disease, as previous research has shown, but also drive its development, the researchers said.
Asis stated that exploring the link between inflammation and the development of Parkinson's is an important piece of the larger puzzle surrounding the many unknown aspects of the disease.
“Inflammation is understudied and its role in neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease is poorly understood,” she said.
“But now they're starting to see inflammation-related cells that are part of that pathway and those are driving some of these disease processes. So if an individual experiences persistent or increased inflammation and develops Parkinson's disease, it is thought that that inflammatory process may play a very important and not yet well understood role.”
The researchers also discovered that Lewy bodies contain extra cell parts. This new insight into what they are made of, along with the ability to study their formation in real time, could give drug developers new targets to slow the progression of Parkinson's disease, the researchers added.
“The results support previous research showing that an immune response plays an important role in the development of Parkinson's,” Armin Bayati, a PhD student in McPherson's laboratory and first author of the study, said in the press release.
“Future studies should focus on understanding how inflammation caused by an over-excited immune system triggers the formation of Lewy bodies in combination with α-synuclein.”
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Katie Dangerfield
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