Scientists visualized and quantified for the first time in human brain tissue the groups of proteins considered to trigger Parkinson’s, an advance that may mark a milestone in the study and fight against the most rapidly growing neurological disease in the world.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge, University College London, the Francis Crick Institute and the Polytechnic of Montreal achieved this, thanks to the development of an imaging technique that allows them to see, count and compare those groups of proteins, responsible for Parkinson’s beginning to develop in the brain, but which until now had evaded direct detection; This Wednesday they publish the results in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
The new findings could help unravel the mechanisms by which Parkinson’s spreads through the brain and support the development of diagnoses and possible treatments.
The second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease
Parkinson’s is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease in the world, and it is a chronic disorder that affects the nervous system and evolves progressively, generating varying degrees of disability and dependency.
By 2050, the number of people with Parkinson’s worldwide is expected to double to 25 million, and although there are medications that can help alleviate some of the symptoms of the disease, such as tremor and stiffness, there are no drugs that can slow or stop it.
For more than a hundred years, doctors have recognized Parkinson’s by the presence of large protein deposits – the so-called ‘Lewy bodies’ – but scientists already suspected that smaller, early-formed groups could cause damage to brain cells.
These groups (the so-called “alpha-synuclein oligomers”) are so small that until now they could not be seen, since they only measure a few nanometers in length. “Lewy bodies are the hallmark of Parkinson’s, but they basically indicate where the disease has developed, not where it is currently located,” said researcher Steven Lee, from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and co-leader of the research.
But observing the disease in its early stages “would reveal much more about how the disease develops in the brain and how we could treat it,” the researcher stressed in the summary provided by the magazine.
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First markers of Parkinson’s?
The team examined brain tissue samples from deceased people with Parkinson’s and compared them with healthy individuals of similar age, and discovered the presence of these groups of proteins in both healthy brains and those who had developed the disease. The main difference between brains with and without disease resided in the size of the “oligomers”, which were larger, brighter and more numerous in samples with disease, suggesting a direct relationship with the progression of this neurodegenerative disorder.
The team also discovered a subclass of these “oligomers” that appeared only in Parkinson’s patients and that could be the first visible markers of the disease, possibly years before symptoms appear.
“This method not only gives us a snapshot,” said Montreal Polytechnic scientist Lucien Weiss, who co-led the research, adding that it also provides a complete atlas of protein changes in the brain, and similar technologies could be applied to other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease.
‘Like finding a needle in a haystack’
The researchers stressed that visualizing these groups of proteins was “like finding a needle in a haystack,” but they stressed the significance of the finding, because knowing where they are could be decisive in identifying specific cell types in certain regions of the brain.
“The only real way to understand what happens in human diseases is to study the human brain directly, but due to its enormous complexity, this is a great challenge,” confirmed researcher Sonia Gandhi, from the Francis Crick Institute, and concluded: “we hope that overcoming this technological barrier will allow us to understand why, where and how protein groups are formed and how this alters the brain environment and leads to disease.”
With information from EFE
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