Public release date: 4-Jul-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ] Contact: Daniel Stimson, NINDS nindspressteam@ninds.nih.gov 301-496-5751 NIH/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Researchers have taken a step toward personalized medicine for Parkinson's disease, by investigating signs of the disease in patient-derived cells and testing how the cells respond to drug treatments. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers collected skin cells from patients with genetically inherited forms of Parkinson's and reprogrammed those cells into neurons. They found that neurons derived from individuals with distinct types of Parkinson's showed common signs of distress and vulnerability in particular, abnormalities in the cellular energy factories known as mitochondria. At the same time, the cells' responses to different treatments depended on the type of Parkinson's each patient had. The results were published in Science Translational Medicine. "These findings suggest new opportunities for clinical trials of Parkinson's disease, in which cell reprogramming technology could be used to identify the patients most likely to respond to a particular intervention," said Margaret Sutherland, Ph.D., a program director at NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). A consortium of researchers conducted the study with primary funding from NINDS. The consortium … Continue reading →

NEW YORK (WABC) -- About 1 million people are living with Parkinson's disease in the U.S. and 69-year-old Bob Van Housen is one of them. He's always been active and has never been one to slow down, but Parkinson's has forced him to. Now, Bob is part of a new study, trying a unique treatment for Parkinson's and he's taken to it - hook, line and sinker. Twelve years ago, Bob was diagnosed with the disease and as it progressed his symptoms did too. Bob and his wife Carole even stopped traveling because of the disease. To relieve symptoms Bob would take a pill called Levadopa every few hours just to be able walk and talk. "Very suddenly, the medicine would stop handling the symptoms," Carole Van Housen said. About a year ago Bob enrolled in a trial at Cleveland Clinic to test a new, more consistent way to deliver a gel form of the same medication he was already using. "A tube is inserted in the stomach, but the tube ends in the small intestines where the medications, and also our food, nutrients are absorbed, anyways so the Levadopa liquid gel is pumped continuously from an outside source," Dr. … Continue reading →