|
Can
Coffee Keep Parkinson's Away?
(HealthScout)
-- That morning jolt of java may not be so bad for you after all.
At least in mice, caffeine appears to help stop the development
of Parkinson's disease, says a new study.
But it's too
soon to suggest that an extra latte will stop the disease in people,
the researchers say.
"What we showed
in this [study] was that caffeine in a mouse model can prevent
the loss of dopamine, which is the key chemical signal lost in
Parkinson's," says Dr. Michael Schwarzschild, a professor of neurology
at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Parkinson's
disease affects 1.5 million Americans, reports the Parkinson's
Disease Foundation. Symptoms include loss of movement, tremors,
stiffness and poor balance. The cause of the disease is unknown,
but people with Parkinson's have much lower levels of the neurotransmitter
dopamine. One treatment for Parkinson's is dopamine replacement.
Schwarzschild
and colleague Dr. Jiang-Fan Chen studied mice that were given
either caffeine in varying doses or a placebo injection before
they were infected with a chemically induced form of Parkinson's.
The lowest
dose of caffeine was the equivalent of one to two cups of coffee
for a human, says Schwarzschild.
The study
found that caffeine blocked the brain receptor believed responsible
for the dopamine loss. This receptor, known as A2A, has very limited
activity, mostly in the small area of the brain that malfunctions
in Parkinson's patients.
"The effects
were dose-dependent. The more caffeine the [mice] were exposed
to, the greater the protective effect, up to the point where there
was almost complete protection against the toxic effects," says
Schwarzschild.
Results of
the study appear in the current issue of the journal Neuroscience.
Schwarzschild
says the results support those from two large human studies that
found the more caffeine consumed, the less likely the development
of Parkinson's.
Schwarzschild
says scientists have known for some time that blocking the A2A
receptor enhances movement in Parkinson's patients.
"Blocking
this receptor with a drug holds promise as a symptomatic therapy
and has led to clinical trials of such drugs for Parkinson's disease.
Our study and others now raise the possibility that such drugs
may offer an additional benefit of slowing the course of the disease."
And, Schwarzschild
says because A2A acts on such a small area of the brain, treatments
to block its activity probably would have few side effects.
The researchers
say they don't know what effect caffeine would have had if given
to the mice after they'd been given the Parkinson's-like disease.
Dr. Leon Zacharowicz,
a neurologist at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow,
N.Y., says Schwarzschild's study "gives us another piece of the
Parkinson's puzzle, and it's nice to know that not everything
we do is bad for us."
But he says
people shouldn't up their caffeine intake. "The jury is still
out, though I would be pleasantly surprised if something as simple
as a cup of coffee a day could keep Parkinson's away," he says.
Schwarzschild's
plans to compare caffeine intake in human Parkinson's patients
to the speed with which the disease progresses.
For
more information about Parkinson's, go to the
Parkinson's Disease Foundation, or to
Parkinsons New Zealand.
Reference
Source 101
For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick
Prevention Resources".
|
