By TAKAHIRO TAKENOUCHI/ Staff Writer
June 26, 2024 at 06:00 JST
An image of the brain of a healthy elderly individual is compared with a photo of the brain of a patient with Parkinson’s disease or Lewy body dementia. Both images were taken with positron emission tomography (PET). The latter image
Researchers in Japan scored a world first by imaging how a substance responsible for Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia accumulates in patients’ brains.
The breakthrough is expected to lead to the development of treatments targeting the causal substance of those intractable diseases, just like Alzheimer's.
It was achieved by a team primarily from the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) in Chiba Prefecture close to Tokyo.
The findings were published in the U.S. scientific journal Neuron on June 6 at (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.05.006).
“While the number of Parkinson’s patients is on the rise due to the aging of society, no radical therapies have been completed,” said Hironobu Endo, chief researcher on neurology at QST. “We will be working to take advantage of our findings for the development of therapeutic drugs and the elucidation of the disease' conditions.”
Parkinson’s is characterized by tremors in the limbs and body stiffness. Patients with Lewy body dementia have been known to hallucinate.
Both conditions are thought to be associated with the accumulation in brain cells of a protein called alpha-synuclein.
However, alpha-synuclein could not be imaged from outside the body with positron emission tomography (PET) and other techniques. This meant treatments could not be developed to target the substance.
With this in mind, the research team referred to the PET method to image the causative substance for Alzheimer’s.
The researchers tinkered with a medical agent that attaches itself to the Alzheimer’s-linked substance for PET. By doing so, they developed another agent whose molecular structure binds strongly to alpha-synuclein.
The finished agent for PET was applied to 18 individuals: eight elderly people in good health, eight Parkinson’s patients and two suffering from Lewy body dementia.
Images of the subjects’ brains captured with PET showed patients had a larger volume of alpha-synuclein than their healthy counterparts. It was also confirmed that larger amounts of alpha-synuclein were apt to result in severer motor dysfunction.
The team said these outcomes will help future studies on the connections between the severity of the condition and the degree of alpha-synuclein’s accumulation in the brain.
The findings are also expected to prove helpful in assessing the effectiveness of medicines targeting alpha-synuclein.
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