Word: parkinsonism
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...more than a year, Tess Follensbee had found it easier to start moving her rigid muscles if she walked backward, so pronounced was her Parkinson's disease. In May, all that changed. The 39-year-old mother of four was one of the first half a dozen Americans to undergo experimental brain surgery for Parkinson's at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Last week some 500 medical researchers, gathered at a symposium sponsored by the University of Rochester in New York, watched a videotape of Follensbee in awed silence as she triumphantly, if tentatively, propelled herself forward. Says...
...transplanting of tissue from one of her adrenal glands to her brain -- may be only a prelude to even more remarkable developments. Several scientists at the Rochester meeting, citing promising research on animals, predicted that human fetal tissue would eventually be implanted in brains not only to treat Parkinson's but Huntington's and Alzheimer's diseases as well as other brain disorders. Given the rapid surgical advances recently, there is no question that the rush is on to try adrenal-cell implants to correct Parkinson's, a neural disorder that afflicts an estimated 1 million Americans. At the Rochester...
...Parkinson's disease, which causes trembling and muscular rigidity, stems from the still unexplained gradual death of most of the cells in a tiny, darkly pigmented area of the brain called the substantia nigra. The cells produce dopamine, a chemical that helps transmit impulses from the brain through the nervous system to the muscles. The Vanderbilt operations, adapting a technique that was developed in Sweden and first used successfully in Mexico last year, involve transplanting dopamine-producing tissue from one of the patient's two adrenal glands (located atop the kidneys) into the brain. Since the cells are the patient...
Despite the heartening Parkinson's results reported in Rochester, doctors at the symposium were cautious. "In my mind, there is no question that the patients get better," said Dr. Rene Drucker-Colin, a leader of the transplant team at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, in Mexico City. "The real question is: For how long will they get better? Obviously, if the answer is six months, it would be less important to do this operation." Admitted Dr. George Allen, chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Vanderbilt, where twelve more operations are planned later this year: "This is still very much...
Whether or not the recoveries prove to be long lasting, University of Rochester Neurobiologist John Sladek and Yale Psychiatrist Eugene Redmond see a braver new world ahead. The two scientists reported reversing the effects of Parkinson's in adult African green monkeys by implanting cells from the substantia nigra of monkey fetuses, and believe that fetal brain grafts offer a better bet for Parkinson's patients. Vanderbilt researchers, using fetal nerve-tissue implants in experiments with rats, also reported progress in reducing chemically induced symptoms of Huntington's disease, a fatal genetic brain disorder. Others expressed hope that once...