| Link to Pestisides | Creatine Clinical Trial | Promising New Treament |
Parkinson’s Linked to Pesticides, Head Trauma
Pesticides and head injury can both bump up risks for Parkinson’s disease, European researchers report.Moreover, odds for the illness increase as exposure to these brain insults rises, the report found.
For example, “Those who were heavily exposed to pesticides had a 41 percent increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, and those with lower exposure had a 13 percent increased risk,” said lead researcher Dr. Finlay Dick, from the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Aberdeen University Medical School, Aberdeen, U.K.
In addition, people who were knocked unconscious even once had a 35 percent increased risk of developing Parkinson’s, Dick said.
That finding has real implications for sports such as boxing, the researchers said. In fact, professional boxing legend Muhammad Ali, 65, now suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease.
The findings are published in the May 30 online edition of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Steven Reinberg, HealthDay News (2007) The Michael J Fox Foundation For Parkinson’s Reasearch, www.michaeljfox.org/news. Sourced 25/06/2007
Creatine Clinical Trial
The NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) is launching a large-scale clinical trial to learn if the nutritional supplement creatine can slow the progression of Parkinson’s disease (PD). While creatine is not an approved therapy for PD or any other condition, it is widely thought to improve exercise performance. The potential benefit of creatine for PD was identified by Parkinson’s researchers through a new rapid method for screening potential compounds.
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; (22/03/2007) NIH Announces Phase III Clinical Trial of Creatine for Parkinson’s Disease www.ninds.nih.gov Sourced 25/06/2007
New treatment promising for Parkinson’s
An experimental treatment for Parkinson’s disease seemed to improve symptoms — dramatically so, for one 59-year-old man — without causing side effects in an early study of a dozen patients. The gene therapy treatment involved slipping billions of copies of a gene into the brain to calm overactive brain circuitry. The small study focused on testing the safety of the procedure rather than its effectiveness, and experts cautioned it’s too soon to draw conclusions about how well it works. But they called the results promising and said the approach merits further studies. “We still have quite a bit more testing to do,” said Dr. Michael Kaplitt of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, an author of the study. Still, “the initial results are extremely encouraging.”
Kaplitt and collaborators report their results in this week’s issue of the British medical journal, The Lancet. They’re not alone in trying gene therapy for Parkinson’s. In April, another team told a medical meeting that its experiments, which delivered a different kind of gene to a different part of the brain, also appeared safe and gave a preliminary hint of benefit.
Michael Ritter (22/062007) New treatment promising for Parkinson’s; Yahoo News! http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070623/ap_on_he_me/parkinson_s_treatment Sourced 25/06/2007
