Parkinson's disease may start before birth

A study showed that people who develop Parkinson's disease before age 50 may trace its origin before birth. The findings may lend clue to a drug that might help correct these disease processes.

The study published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine showed that those patients may have been born with disordered brain cells that went undetected for decades.

The research team from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center used special stem cells they generated from adult blood cells. They induced those stem cells from patients into dopamine neurons and then cultured them in a dish.

The researchers identified two abnormalities in those dopamine neurons in the dish. The first one is the accumulation of a protein called alpha-synuclein which occurs in most forms of Parkinson's disease.

The second is the malfunctioning cell structures that act as "trash cans" for the cell to break down and dispose of proteins. This malfunction could cause the protein to build up.

"What we are seeing using this new model are the very first signs of young-onset Parkinson's," said the study's senior author Clive Svendsen with Cedars-Sinai.

"It appears that dopamine neurons in these individuals may continue to mishandle alpha-synuclein over a period of 20 or 30 years, causing Parkinson's symptoms to emerge."

The investigators also used the stem cell model to test a number of drugs that might reverse the abnormalities they had observed.

They found that one drug was already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating precancers of the skin. It could reduce the elevated levels of alpha-synuclein in both the dopamine neurons in the dish and in laboratory mice.

The researchers are planning more research to determine whether the abnormalities the study found in neurons of young-onset Parkinson's patients also exist in other forms of Parkinson's.