ABOVE: Scans of the brains of mice show a reduction in dopamine (colored areas) in the striatum of the Parkinson’s disease model that was injected with pathogenic α-synuclein (right; control mouse on left).
TED DAWSON ET AL. / NEURON, 2019
In 2003, Heiko Braak, then a neuroanatomist at the University of Frankfurt, suggested that Parkinson’s disease pathology may start in the gut and travel from there to the brain long before a patient shows symptoms. The idea, based on postmortem analyses of samples from parkinson’s patients, has been hotly debated ever since.
In a study published today (June 26) in Neuron, Ted Dawson, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and his team created an animal model of the disease by injecting particular proteins into the stomachs of mice. About a month later, the animals showed symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The model not only demonstrates how the disease protein can ...
