Simon Fraser College researchers are utilizing a brand new strategy to mind imaging that might enhance how medicine are prescribed to deal with Parkinson’s illness.
The brand new examine, revealed within the journal Motion Problems, seems to be at why levodopa—the primary drug utilized in dopamine substitute remedy—is typically much less efficient in sufferers.
The drug is often prescribed to assist scale back the motion signs related to the neurodegenerative dysfunction. Whereas it’s efficient in bettering signs for the overwhelming majority of sufferers, not everybody experiences the identical degree of profit.
With the intention to decide why, an SFU collaboration with researchers in Sweden has used magnetoencephalography (MEG) expertise to find out how the drug impacts alerts within the mind.
“Parkinson’s is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative illness worldwide and it’s the most quickly rising, when it comes to incidence,” says Alex Wiesman, assistant professor of biomedical physiology and kinesiology at SFU. “Treating this illness, each when it comes to serving to folks with their signs, but additionally looking for methods to reverse the results, is turning into increasingly vital. If clinicians can see how levodopa prompts sure components of the mind in a affected person, it will possibly assist to tell a extra customized strategy to remedy.”
The examine was a collaboration with researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, who used MEG to gather information from 17 sufferers with Parkinson’s illness—a comparatively small pattern measurement. Researchers mapped contributors’ mind alerts earlier than and after taking the drug, with the intention to see how and the place the drug impacted mind exercise.
MEG is a complicated non-invasive expertise that measures the magnetic fields produced by the mind’s electrical alerts. It could possibly assist clinicians and researchers to review mind issues and ailments, together with mind accidents, tumors, epilepsy, autism, psychological sickness and extra.
Utilizing this uncommon mind imaging expertise, Wiesman and group developed a brand new evaluation that lets them “search” the mind for off-target drug results.
“With this new approach of analyzing mind imaging information, we are able to monitor in actual time whether or not or not the drug is affecting the suitable mind areas and serving to sufferers to handle their signs,” says Wiesman. “What we discovered was that there are typically ‘off-target’ results of the drug. In different phrases, we might see the drug activating mind areas we do not wish to be activating and that is getting in the way in which of the useful results. We discovered that these individuals who confirmed ‘off-target’ results are nonetheless being helped by the drug, however to not the identical extent as others.”
Parkinson’s illness is a neurodegenerative dysfunction, which means components of the mind turn into progressively broken over time. It predominantly impacts the dopamine-producing neurons in a selected space of the mind referred to as the substantia nigra. Individuals with Parkinson’s illness might expertise a spread of movement-related signs, corresponding to tremors, gradual motion, stiffness and steadiness issues.
Wiesman hopes that a greater understanding of how levodopa impacts a person’s mind alerts might enhance how medicine are prescribed to deal with Parkinson’s.
“This may be actually useful for monitoring individualized responses to these kinds of medicine and serving to with prescribing and therapeutics,” he says.
“So possibly we strive completely different medicines, possibly we modify dosages in a different way. And this helps clinicians get at that query of how we prescribe customized drugs in a approach that actually helps the affected person. The extra we are able to personalize that strategy, make it extra expedient, make it a bit extra particular to that individual, the higher.”
This new kind of mind imaging evaluation isn’t just for learning Parkinson’s illness; any medicines that have an effect on mind signaling will be studied utilizing the strategy developed by Wiesman and colleagues.
SFU’s ImageTech Lab, on the Surrey Memorial Hospital, is residence to the one MEG in western Canada.
“We now have this actually unbelievable expertise proper right here at SFU, and mixed with the brand new evaluation approaches that we’re creating, it offers us a extremely unprecedented look into what’s taking place within the mind,” says Wiesman. “We will use this expertise transferring ahead to review Parkinson’s illness in ways in which nobody has ever achieved earlier than worldwide.
“Our subsequent step is to take our new strategy and apply it to a bigger affected person group. We additionally must translate this analysis to extra accessible mind imaging strategies, like electroencephalogram (EEG). Finally, we wish to make sure that this expertise is helpful for a various inhabitants and extra broadly accessible to sufferers with Parkinson’s illness.”
Extra info:
Alex I. Wiesman et al, Cortical Results of Dopamine Substitute Account for Scientific Response Variability in Parkinson’s Illness, Motion Problems (2025). DOI: 10.1002/mds.30200
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