Tag Archive | Parkinson’s disease
LabBook June 8, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our new weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. […]
Drugs & Exercise: A 1-2 Punch for Parkinson’s?
Exercise is increasingly an important component of treating Parkinson’s disease. To supplement the effects of medication or surgery, Parkinson’s patients may undergo physical therapy or programs such as Tai Chi to improve motor symptoms including balance, gait, and tremor. Generally, the idea behind these exercises is to strengthen the body’s muscles to compensate for the […]
The Source of Levodopa’s Unwanted Dance
The motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease – tremor, inability to initiate movement, rigidity – result from the loss of neurons that secrete the neurotransmitter dopamine. It therefore follows that the best way to treat these symptoms is by replacing a person’s lost dopamine, the strategy behind the drug levodopa. For the first few years, levodopa […]
Folding Failures and Brain Diseases
Proteins are a little like laundry: folding matters. When folded properly, proteins can go about their intended business as the machinery of the cell, responsible for its structure and function. A misfolded protein or two can be an annoyance, temporarily throwing off the order of the cell but easily handled by a cell’s internal janitors. […]
Parkinson’s Disease: A Learning Disorder?
Occasionally, drugs produce beneficial mysteries – effects that are useful to physicians despite being largely unexplained. Levodopa (L-dopa), the most commonly-used treatment for the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, is meant to replace dopamine, the neurotransmitter lost as the disease progresses to its most severe stages. Clinicians recognize that the benefical effect builds up slowly over […]
Linkage 9/25: Good News, Full Moons and Butterfly GPS
Rare Encouraging News in HIV and Parkinson’s Disease HIV/AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease are two areas of medical research where good news is hard to come by, as researchers encounter countless setbacks in trying to translate promising laboratory findings into clinical practice. Both diseases have seen progress in the past decade in ex post facto treatments […]
