Worsened Parkinson's Disease with Low B 12

   Folks with early untreated Parkinson's disease with low vitamin B12 (less than 157 pmol/L) were found to have greater worsening of mobility and cognitive decline over time.
  Further, elevated homocysteine predicted greater cognitive decline.
Mov Disord. 2018 Mar 6

Reduce Parkinson's Disease Risk: Truncal Vagotomy ?

  Researchers out of Sweden reviewed patients that underwent truncal vagotomy (a surgical procedure that functionally disconnects multiple abdominal organs by cutting the vagus nerve supply to them) and found a decreased risk of developing Parkinson's disease compared to controls. In fact there was a greater decreased risk in those that underwent selective vagotomy (which disconnects only the stomach).
  These findings offer further support for the Braak hypothesis that Parkinson's disease starts in the gut and spreads to the brain.
Neurology 2017Apr 26

Is Parkinson's Disease an Autoimmune Disease?

  Following up an earlier study, researchers at Columbia and La Jolla have discovered a population of T cells in the blood of patients with Parkinson's disease that recognize alpha-synuclein peptides providing evidence that PD may be,in part,an autoimmune disease, and autoimmune targeted treatment could potentially slow or stop the disease process.
Nature 2017;Epub 2017 Jun21
Nat Commun 2014;5:3633

Phenylbutyrate : A Promising Treatment for Parkinson's Disease

  University of Colorado School of Medicine researchers have found that phenylbutyrate stops the progression of PD in mice. The drug, previously approved for treatment of a rare metabolic disease in infants, has been found to increase alpha-synuclein in the bloodstream of both patients with early PD and age matched controls. Alpha-synuclein accumulates in excess in the brain's of patients with PD. Therefore, the finding of an increase in alpha-synuclein in the blood of phenylbutyrate treated patients with PD suggests that this protein that accumulates in excess in their brain's is being cleared by the drug. This new research follows the earlier study of Zhou as published in 2011.
http://bit.ly/NT-SfN-phenylbutyrate
J Biol Chem 2011;286:1491-1451

Immuno-therapy For Parkinson's Disease ?

   From the labs of the University of Pennsylvania comes an important supportive paper to the growing body of evidence that alpha-synuclein (AS) travels through the brain in a prion-like manner effecting anatomically connected regions, inducing Lewy body formation and causing the cell death of dopaminergic neurons.
   This study suggests that "templated recruitment and transmission" is the mechanism of disease. 
   The results also suggest that delivering antibodies to the brain of affected animals to bind to extracellular AS would be a way of interrupting the spreading process and theoretically halting the disease.
Science 2012;338(6109):949-953