Drug helps Parkinson's sufferers cope

A potential treatment for Parkinson's disease has greatly improved the condition of all five trial patients, British doctors say.

Although they said they could not yet announce a possible cure for one of the most common degenerative brain conditions, the doctors were optimistic the treatment could form the basis of an effective therapy within five years.

The pilot study involved the infusion of a growth-factor drug directly into the regions of the brain that degenerate in people suffering from Parkinson's. Some of the patients responded so well they learned to laugh again and others regained their sense of smell, which typically is lost in the early stages of the disease.

Roger Nelson, one of the five guinea-pigs in the trial, said the treatment had improved his ability to talk, walk, smile and laugh. "It is not something I expected to change that rapidly, but one of the things people with Parkinson's experience is a lost sense of smell," said Mr Nelson.

"I had the operation on the Friday and by Sunday lunchtime I could smell. Very shortly after, I noticed that I could be a bit more articulate. Speech had become fairly difficult," he said. "My wife passed a slightly risque comment just after I got home from hospital and I burst out laughing, which I hadn't been able to do for several years.

"It has been progressive little changes. We used to be quite keen bridge players and I got to the stage where I could not deal or shuffle the cards, but now I can fan the cards and pick them out and play again."

Steven Gill, the consultant neurosurgeon who treated the patients at the Frenchay hospital in Bristol, said the drug, called glial derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF), stimulated cell growth naturally in the brain. The drug worked especially well on nerve cells that produced the neurotransmitter dopamine - a chemical messenger that was lacking in people with Parkinson's.

Symptoms of the disease range from slowness of movement, a shuffling gait and stiffness, to tremors, depression and an impaired ability to think.

Scientists have identified the cause as a degeneration of the dopamine-producing nerve cells in the dorsal putamen region of the brain.

Dr Gill said: "We can deliver [GDNF] very precisely to areas in the brain in the concentrations we need to cause recovery and we can control that very precisely.

"We thought that this drug would take some months or years to be effective [but] we found that, really, within a month or two, patients were noticing significant changes."

Each patient was fitted with two pumps buried in the abdominal cavity, which supplied small and carefully controlled quantities of GDNF to the brain's dorsal putamen through pipes connected to catheters inserted through the skull.

But the hospital said the treatment was still in its infancy and more trials would be needed on a larger number of patients before the therapy could be used on all patients.

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