What Does The Future Hold For Parkinson's Research And Those With The Disease?

Great progress has already been made in three distinct realms of PD:

• Increasing knowledge about the causes of PD, including the identification of four genes for PD as well as some clues to environmental causes. (PD is twice as common in people who work closely with other members of the public.)

• Improved disease management that minimizes side effects and maximizes benefit from the available drugs

• Ability to improve function using new surgical treatments

Advances in imaging procedures have already advanced our knowledge about PD, by allowing researchers to visualize chemical changes as they occur in the brains of living people, where in the past researchers had to rely on postmortem autopsy tissue.

By charting the rate of cell loss over time with repeated scans in the same individuals, researchers may be able to determine the rate of progression. From this, using mathematical models, they might be able to determine when PD actually began in an individual. Researchers are now, and have been for many years, involved in new clinical trials, technologies, surgical procedures , and drug treatments.

Today's progress may mean tomorrow's prevention or cure, as PD research continues to focus on areas such as:

• functions and anatomy of the motor system and its regulation of movement and relationship to the brain

• PD's possible connection to environmental factors such as viruses and toxins

• genetic factors to determine whether defective genes play a role and whether certain people are genetically susceptible to developing PD

• An adhesive patch that continually supply levodopa to prevent fluctuating response.

• implanting capsules containing dopamine-producing cells into the brain

• development of drugs to delay, prevent, or reverse the disease - some of which are controlled-release formulas.

Much research is underway studying various techniques to replace the cells that have been destroyed. Research using fetal tissue is fraught with problems including government resistance. Thus alternative and better sources for dopamine-producing cells are being studied. Studies using retinal epithelial cells are already being carried out in humans and early results have been published.

Of even greater significance is stem cell technology, using basic cells which can reproduce in the laboratory, and can be easily cultivated into large populations. The trick is turning these stem cells into dopamine-producing nerve cells, like those cells in the substantia nigra of the brain that produce dopamine. This has recently been achieved in laboratory experiments. Human trials should begin within the next couple of years.