Parkinson's disease is an intractable brain and neurological disease in which limbs tremor, movement becomes slow, and daily life becomes more difficult as it becomes more serious. It is a disease with a relatively large number of patients, which is said to affect 1000 in 1 people, but the mechanism of its onset is not clear.Also, at present, the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease is limited to determining whether or not there is a suspicion of Parkinson's disease from the examination of motor symptoms and psychiatric symptoms. there is no.This time, a research group led by Associate Professor Minoru Koyamauchi, Graduate School of Medicine, Tohoku University, Satomi Kikuta, Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tokushima University, and Jiro Kasahara, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tokushima University, has a brain whose neural activity is increasing due to Parkinson's disease. Areas (territories) were visualized using MRI, and the areas where the degree of increase correlates with the severity of Parkinson's disease were clarified.This discovery may lead to early diagnosis using MRI as well as elucidation of the onset mechanism of Parkinson's disease.
Parkinson's disease is said to occur when the number of neurons that send dopamine to the basal ganglia striatum, which is involved in motor function, decreases, and the amount of dopamine in the striatum decreases.However, there are various theories as to whether the decrease in dopamine causes changes in neural activity in which areas of the brain and causes Parkinson's disease symptoms, and it was not clear.The research group applied the "Activation-Induced Manganese enhanced MRI" (AIM-MRI) method, which can visualize neural activity, to mice with Parkinson's disease, and the neural activity is changed by Parkinson's disease. We identified areas of the brain and identified areas of the brain where neural activity was altered in relation to the severity of Parkinson's disease symptoms.
The results of this study were published in "Scientific Reports" (electronic version) on August 8.
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