Parkinson's Disease Scrambles Brain's Switchboard

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They then concentrated their study on the part of the brain affected by Parkinson's -- the basal ganglia. In a normal brain, neurons -- the cells that conduct electrical messages -- cluster together by body type. For example, several clusters might correspond to an arm and other clusters are responsible for a leg.

In the Parkinson's brain, these clusters are smaller because the neurons on the edges of the clusters have broken away, West says. When these neurons break away, they change their function and start responding to different input. So, a cluster that originally was programmed to respond to a touch on the arm might learn to react to a poke in the back. Interestingly, West says these renegade neurons can actually learn to respond to more than one area of the body, which normal neurons don't do.

The problem is, the connections in the body parts don't change. So, when the neuron that has broken off from the arm now responds to a touch on the leg, it fires off its message to respond, but the leg doesn't "hear" that message; the arm does.

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West says his findings explain why the commonly used treatment, a dopamine-replacement drug, doesn't help with slow movement. Once these new connections are made, he says, they can't be "taken back."

He says more research should be done on prevention so these changes don't have the chance to occur.

Drafta says patients shouldn't be discouraged by these findings. It's important to remember that these results come from a study of rats that did not get Parkinson's naturally, she explains. While that doesn't mean the results are not valuable, it does mean it's not necessarily what happens in the human brain, Drafta says.

Also, these findings don't explain the other symptoms of Parkinson's, Drafta adds.

"There are still a lot of ifs here," she says.

What To Do

For more information on Parkinson's disease, go to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation or to the Parkinson's Disease Society.

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