A new study by Montreal scientists published today in Nature demonstrates that a gut infection can lead to a pathology resembling Parkinson’s disease (PD) in a mouse model lacking a gene linked to the human disease.
This discovery extends recent work by the same group suggesting that PD has a major immune component, providing new avenues for therapeutic strategies.
The collaborative study was the work of a joint team of scientists led by Michel Desjardins and Louis-Eric Trudeau of Université de Montréal, Heidi McBride at the Montreal Neurological Institute, and Samantha Gruenheid at McGill University.
The number of PD patients in the world more than doubled between 1990 and 2016, from 2.5 million to 6.1 million. A relatively conservative projected doubling of the number of patients over the next 30 years would yield more than 12 million patients worldwide by about 2050.
Read more at: University of Montreal
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