Contact: Roger Martin, Research and Public Service, (785) 864-7239.
Columnist Roger Martin writes about research at KU and edits a webzine at http://www.research.ku.edu/explore.
Aunt Norma was going to Arcadia, California, to visit a friend. She and my mother were waiting in the car for the bus to arrive.
"When it came," my mother says, "I opened the car door to get out. Aunt Norma didn't. She looked at me and said, 'I can't move. My body's frozen.'"
How long, my mother asked, before it would unfreeze?
"Sometimes it takes 20 minutes," Aunt Norma said, "sometimes a half hour."
They watched the bus drive off.
That's what it's like with Parkinson's disease. Aunt Norma's had it for about 30 years. Its first symptom is often a tremor in a hand at rest. Movements slow. Walking becomes difficult. The face becomes masklike. The eyes don't blink.
Everyone who knows someone with Parkinson's is affected by the disease.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has, as one of its three initiatives this fiscal year, a focus on deep-brain electrical stimulation to help people with Parkinson's.
The death of brain cells causes the symptoms, says Raj Pahwa, director of the Parkinson's Disease Clinical and Research Center at the University of Kansas Medical Center. By the time the first tremor appears, 75 to 90 percent of the cells that control fine movement are dead.
With cell death, there's too little dopamine in the brain. The conventional medication for Parkinson's, L-dopa, works for a while by replacing the lost dopamine. But then it stops working consistently.
Several new treatments show promise, Pahwa says. These include new dopamine-like drugs currently being tested at his center.
Another focus there is deep-brain electrical stimulation. It involves threading a wire through the brain toward a pea-size target called the subthalamic nucleus, which is overactive in Parkinson's patients. A very few microvolts administered about 10 times a second calms it.
Accuracy is essential. A video of a patient shows her becoming deeply depressed when the electrode falls less than a tenth of an inch shy of its target. When the electrode is withdrawn, she recovers quickly. Other times, patients will laugh inappropriately.
But the brightest star on the therapeutic horizon for Parkinson's patients, Pahwa says, involves stem cells.
These immature cells can be treated and transformed into any kind of cell in the body, including brain cells. The dream is to grow brain cells in the laboratory, then implant them in patients.
But stem-cell research is controversial. The best source of stem cells is the embryos discarded daily by fertility clinics.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) has introduced a bill to allow embryonic stem-cell research to receive federal funding. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and others have spoken against the measure.
Nobody has elected me to anything, but here's my question:
If using cells taken from embryos destined for the trash can could someday help the Aunt Normas of this world to catch their buses, shouldn't we encourage that?