Parkinson’s disease
Overview
Dopamine exerts control over body movement and brain activity. It’s therefore no surprise that its loss creates profound problems.
Parkinson’s disease symptoms appear when neurons that produce dopamine in a specific part of the brain—the substantia nigra—die or become impaired. Without dopamine, an important neurotransmitter, movement is disrupted, leading to the tremors and balance problems that mark Parkinson’s. It is a chronic, progressive disease, and while most patients develop symptoms at age 65 or older, 15 percent of those diagnosed are not yet 50.
Medicines that mimic dopamine function provide short-term alleviation of symptoms, but they do not prevent disease progression. Research into neurodegeneration and preventative measures is therefore crucial to finding preventions or cures. The Jackson Laboratory has recently teamed with the Michael J. Fox Foundation to collect and develop better animal models for the disease and make them available to the research community.
Research
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease. It’s caused primarily by the loss of dopamine-producing cells in the substantia nigra, a region of the brain. People with PD display impaired movement and shaking, and cognitive and behavioral problems may also arise at later stages of the disease. Loss of norepinephrine at nerve endings may also lead to fatigue and blood pressure abnormalities.
PD therapies alleviate movement problems for a time, but the disease has no cure. Researchers are still trying to understand why the brain cells die and find more effective treatments that address the root cause(s) of PD rather than simply diminish the symptoms.
Michael Sasner, Ph.D., leads the The Jackson Laboratory’s Parkinson’s Disease Mouse Model Resource, a crucial new tool in the research arsenal. Funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which was founded by the famous actor who has early-onset PD, the Resource acquires, distributes and improves the consistency and quality of Parkinson’s disease mouse models. Better models for the disease are essential to research into PD and for testing potential new therapies.