WASHINGTON — Parkinson’s disease may stem from an energy crisis in the brain, years before symptoms appear.
If the research proves true, it could suggest a new approach for Parkinson’s: Giving a boost to a key power switch inside brain cells in hopes of slowing the disease’s inevitable march, instead of just treating symptoms.
“It could be a root cause’’ of Parkinson’s, said Dr. Clemens Scherzer of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard University.
No one knows what causes the disease. To find genetic clues, Scherzer gathered an international team of researchers to comb studies of more than 300 samples of brain tissue. Their results were reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
“This is an extremely important and interesting observation that opens up new therapeutic targets,’’ said Dr. Flint Beal of New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College, who was not involved with the new study.
Beal said scientists already are planning first-stage tests to see if a drug used for diabetes might help Parkinson’s, too, by targeting one of the implicated energy genes.
The research involves power factories inside cells, called mitochondria. Increasingly, scientists suspect that malfunctioning mitochondria play some role in a list of degenerative brain diseases.
Brain cells are energy hogs, making up about 2 percent of body weight yet consuming about 20 percent of the body’s energy. So a power drain could trigger some serious long-term consequences.
About 5 million people worldwide, and 1.5 million in the United States, have Parkinson’s, characterized by increasingly severe tremors and periodically stiff or frozen limbs.
Patients gradually lose brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical key to the circuitry that controls muscle movement. There is no known cure, although dopamine-boosting medication and an implanted device called deep brain stimulation can help some symptoms.
The studies examined by Scherzer’s group involved brain tissue from diagnosed Parkinson’s patients, from symptom-free people whose brains showed early Parkinson’s damage was brewing, and from people whose brains appeared normal. They even used a laser beam to cut out individual dopamine-producing neurons in the most ravaged brain region, the substantia nigra, and examine gene activity.
The team found 10 sets of genes that work at abnormally low levels in Parkinson’s patients, genes that turned out to play various roles in the mitochondria’s energy production, the study reported. Especially compelling, the genes also were sluggish in people with presymptomatic, simmering Parkinson’s.
