What everyone should know about Parkinson's Disease
The circumstance that identifies PD (Parkinson's Disease) is loss of dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta, leading to bradykinesia (slowness of voluntary and involuntary movements, but mainly difficulty starting and finishing them), rigidity and tremor.
Current treatment is based on dopamine to alleviate symptoms but here are two main problems: 1.- motor symptoms continue to increase, requiring greater doses of medication, which result in short-term and long-term adverse effects. 2.- dopamine replacement does little to treat non-dopaminergic motor and non-motor symptoms, which typically produce dementia, sleep disturbances, depression, orthostatic hypotension, and postural instability prone to falls.
It is necessary to develop a new approach to PD, and main researchs have been focused upon developing neuroprotective interventions but the results into the clinical realm have largely proved disappointing in the past.
The main problem to finding neuroprotective drugs in PD is the lack of validated biomarkers of progression, which hampers clinical trial design and interpretation. In addition there are difficulties distinguishing symptomatic and neuroprotective effects of candidate neuroprotective therapies, even there may be fundamental flaws in preclinical models and testing.
In this field is where Mememtum aims to help solving some of these problems. Mememtum is a tool, based on computer vision, to measure the movements disorders and tremors in an objective manner, and provides the physician with a numerical value, as does a thermometer with temperature.
However, three recent clinical trials have used a novel delayed-start design in an attempt to overcome some of these roadblocks, if you are interested you can checkout the source of this article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21812497