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It starts with tremors in the arms and legs, progresses to symptoms like body stiffness, unstable posture, and then worsens to a lying down state later.
However, studies have shown that not only neurons in the brain but also intestinal neurons play an important role in the development of Parkinson’s disease.
Supports the medical hypothesis that the disease can start in the intestine.
On the 28th, a team of professors from the Department of Medical Epidemiology at the Karolinska University School of Medicine in Sweden published this article in the journal Nature Genetics.
The human nervous system consists of hundreds of different types of cells with different functions.
To understand the causes of many neuropsychiatric disorders and to challenge the development of therapeutic agents, it is necessary to know what type of cells of the nervous system are involved when a particular disorder occurs.
So the team systematically analyzed which types of neurons caused problems in various brain diseases by linking the results of studies on gene expression in mice to human genetics.
It was enough to guess that dopaminergic neurons could be associated with Parkinson’s disease.
But the intestinal nerve cells were absolutely unexpected.
Another surprising finding is that oligodendrocytes, one of the brain’s supporting cells, affect early Parkinson’s disease.
Damage to oligodendrocytes progressed before the disappearance of dopamine-sensitive neurons.
This suggests that oligodendrocytes have been deeply involved since the onset of Parkinson’s disease.
“It has clinical implications that damage to oligodendrocytes has been identified in the brains of Parkinson’s patients after being reported in animal experiments,” said Dr. Jens Yelling-Lefler, director of the research group in the Department of Biochemistry and Medical Biophysics.
This action of oligodendrocytes is expected to be confirmed, and will be a new stimulus for Parkinson’s disease research that does not have an effective treatment.
“This study has made oligodendrocytes an attractive target for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease,” said the paper’s first author, postdoctoral researcher Julian Briois.
(Yonhap News)
