• Question: What is parkinsons disorder and is parkinsons disorder genetic?

    Asked by mini3dimensions to Adam, Amylou, Mark L, Samantha on 13 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Amy Evans

      Amy Evans answered on 13 Jun 2012:

      Parkinson’s is a condition that affects the nervous system. It gets gradually worse over time. One person in every 500 has Parkinson’s so it affects about 127,000 people in the UK. Most people who get Parkinson’s are aged 50 or over but younger people can get it too.

      People with Parkinson’s don’t have enough of a chemical called dopamine because some nerve cells in their brain have died. Without dopamine people can find that their movements become slower so it takes longer to do things. The loss of nerve cells in the brain causes the symptoms of Parkinson’s to appear. People can have a tremor, get stiff muscles and become slow in their movements.

      There’s currently no cure for Parkinson’s and we don’t yet know why people get the condition. Scientists are doing research to find out what causes Parkinson’s disease. There may be genetic links as Parkinson’s disease can run in families. This might happen when genes change or ‘mutate’ and become abnormal. So far at least nine different genetic mutations have been found to increasing a person’s risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

      Other scientists think that in most cases genetics is not solely responsible for Parkinson’s disease and there needs to be an environmental factor to trigger it in genetically susceptible people. Environmental factors include exposure to harmful chemicals like those put on farm crops or those released into the air from factories and traffic.

      There is a lot of research being done by scientists to find out what causes Parkinson’s disease, so that we can find the best ways to prevent and treat it.

Comments

  • Photo: Austin

    Austin commented on :

    Worth saying that, although there’s no cure for Parkinson’s, there are treatments, most commonly ones based on drugs. The oldest approach is to ‘replace’ dopamine by giving people something called Levo-Dopa (which is what we call a ‘precursor’ for dopamine, so a chemical from which dopamine is made by the body). A lot of substances can’t get from the blood into the brain, but Levo-Dopa can – it is actually transported into the brain by the cells lining the brain’s capillaries. Once in the brain it gets converted to dopamine, which can help with the symptoms of Parkinson’s. Sometimes Levo-Dopa is given together with other drugs to try and stop it being converted into Dopamine in the body OUTSIDE the brain. This can cause side-effects, so it’s often good to stop it. Another type of treatment is drugs which mimic dopamine – the technical term is ‘dopamine agonists’ – and bind to dopamine receptor sites (the sites where dopamine acts in the brain after being released). The treatments are a long way from perfect, but they are a big advance from the days when nothing much could be done for Parkinson’s patients.

    There are some really amazing scientific ‘detective stories’ to do with Parkinson’s – try looking up the 1920s epidemic of “Encephalitis Lethargica’ (there is a Robert de Niro film from 1990 called “Awakenings’ which is connected with this), or the case of the ‘Frozen Addicts’.