BACKGROUND Parkinson disease is a common neurodegenerative disease. The racial, sex, age, and geographic distributions of Parkinson disease in the US are unknown. METHODS We performed a serial cross-sectional study of US Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 and older from the years 1995, and 2000-2005. Using over 450,000 Parkinson disease cases per year, we calculated Parkinson disease prevalence a...

Parkinson disease associated with farming and exposure to agricultural chemicals has been reported in numerous studies; little is known about Parkinson disease risk factors for those living in urban areas. The authors investigated the relation between copper, lead, or manganese emissions and Parkinson disease incidence in the urban United States, studying 29 million Medicare beneficiaries in th...

BACKGROUND Recent data showed that melanoma was more common among patients with Parkinson disease than individuals without Parkinson disease and vice versa. It has been hypothesized that these two diseases may share common genetic and environmental risk factors. METHODS We evaluated the association between single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) selected on the basis of recent genome-wide assoc...

PURPOSE To evaluate the thickness of the 10 retinal layers in the paramacular area of Parkinson disease patients using a new segmentation technology of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to examine whether the thickness of specific layers predicts neurodegeneration or Parkinson disease severity. DESIGN Observational prospective study. METHODS Parkinson disease patients (n = 129) and age-mat...

Background & Aims: The purpose of this research was to study the protective effect of pretreatment with a voluntary exercise on hippocampal level of cerebral dopamine neurotrophic factor (CDNF) after damage induced by intraventricular injection of 6–hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) in rats. Methods: In this experimental study, 24 Wistar rats were randomly divided into 4 groups of healthy control, healt...

Parkinson disease associated with farming and exposure to agricultural chemicals has been reported in numerous studies; little is known about Parkinson disease risk factors for those living in urban areas. The authors investigated the relation between copper, lead, or manganese emissions and Parkinson disease incidence in the urban United States, studying 29 million Medicare beneficiaries in th...

Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) has been shown to exert neuroprotective effects on dopamine (DA) neurons in vivo. Here we report long-term rescue of nigral DA neurons after delayed short-term GDNF administration in a rat lesion model that reproduces the slowly progressing degenerative process seen in Parkinson's disease. GDNF injected close to the substantia nigra provided ne...

8 SAMMANFATTNING 9 ABBREVIATIONS 10 INTRODUCTION 11 Parkinson’s disease 11 Hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease 11 Risk factors 11 Genetic 12 Non-genetic 12 Evaluation of drugs 14 Animal models of Parkinson’s disease 16 Alzheimer’s disease 18 Hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease 18 Amyloid beta 19 Pathology 21 Astrogliosis in Alzheimer’s disease 22 Risk factors 22 Genetic 23 Non-genetic 25 Evaluation o...

The use of a polyclonal antiserum specific to C-terminal tetrapeptide amide of (D-Ala2)deltorphin-I, a naturally occurring amphibian skin opioid peptide, has already demonstrated the presence of immunoreactive neurons in rat midbrain. Double immunostaining identified these neurons as a subpopulation of the mesencephalic dopaminergic neurons that were also tyrosine hydroxylase-immunopositive and...

BACKGROUND This study was designed to obtain the chemical fingerprint and to investigate the effect of Phyllanthus urinaria on telomerase activity and apoptotic pathways in the human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell line (NPC-BM1). MATERIALS AND METHODS The polyphenol compounds in P. urinaria were investigated by HPLC/MS. Cell viability with the treatment of P. urinaria, gallic acid, ellagic aci...