I chose the Parkinson's disease articles. I found the articles to be very interesting. It seems in a lot of diseases today scientist have found ways to fight back by not just using drugs. Scientist are thinking “outside the box” and attacking disease the same way it attacks us, not simply giving drugs to mask the effects of the diseases but after finding what cells are being damaged are working to stop and regenerate those cells so that patients could possibly recover to a previous time in their lives.
Scientist in recent years have developed drugs for many diseases but drugs do not reverse damages in most cases. In these articles it shows examples of how some proteins being reintroduced to patients (mice) have made drastic changes and will lead to a cure for Parkinson’s disease im sure in the very near future. In the study researchers use deactivated virus’s to carry the proteins “Sonic Hedgehog and Gli-1” to the cells in adult rats. The experiment also included a control group that wasn’t given the proteins. After four weeks the researchers found that rat’s brains that had not received the proteins had lost 80% of neurons in the substantia nigra part of the brain. The rats that had been injected in the study only lost 20-30% in the same area. This is a great discovery but as stated in the article it is a large jump from rats to humans as the human body’s immune system could simply attack the virus that carries the proteins.
Parkinson’s disease damages nerve cells in the part of the brain that produce a chemical called dopamine. As stated before doctors give patients drugs to help replenish the loss of dopamine and this as with many drugs has a short positive response. Due to the drugs not preventing the disease from progressing the drugs loose it usefulness.
In my opinion these articles give great examples of how the experiments were conducted and the researchers came to the conclusions from following the scientific method. The experiments