Can Parkinson's Be Prevented?

"Can Parkinson's Be Prevented?"

That's the provocative title of a symposium I'm attending this evening. Dr. Robert Edwards of the University of California San Francisco is giving the featured talk. Most of the conversation surrounding Parkinson's focuses on treatment and the long hoped for cure, but the idea of prevention is at least equally important.

How might PD be prevented? Well, in working on this documentary I've come across three approaches. First, determining a definitive trigger for the disease. As you've probably read elsewhere, researchers have focused a lot of attention on possible environmental triggers for the disease, with pesticides being the most frequently citied potential cause. If a definitive link could be established, then removing that source from the environment would hopefully prevent disease occurrence. "We haven't found the smoking gun yet," says Dr. William Langston at the Parkinson's Institute, "but that's what we're looking for."

A second way scientists often talk about prevention is through genetics. Familial Parkinson's is relatively rare, but the geneticists who study PD think that those cases may provide key insights into how to stop the disease in its tracks early on. That's because genetics might allow us to identify people susceptible to the disease long before symptoms ever start. If you could intervene in those cases at that early point, you could in effect prevent the disease. And scientists like Dr. Matt Farrer at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville are hopeful that they can figure out how to fix the genetic mutation that leads to familial Parkinson's, then apply that fix to the more common form of the disease. As Farrer comments in our video post, "How close are we? A lot closer than we were ten years ago. A lot closer."

A third way Parkinson's might be prevented, or at least slowed down, is through a variety of neuro-protective approaches. While none of these is firmly established yet, some scientists think that something as basic as exercise may have a protective effect. You might have viewed our earlier video showing researchers at the University of Pittsburgh who trained monkeys to run on treadmills and then injected them with a low dose of a toxin that creates a Parkinson's-like condition. The monkeys who'd been exercising were much less affected than the control animals.

So, those are three ways I've found scientists approaching Parkinson's prevention. But there may well be new developments. I'll be very eager to hear what Dr. Edwards has to say this evening and will report back on his presentation in my next post.