2023-05-16 04:05:50
At the Free University of Brussels, Professor Serge Schiffmann is working on Parkinson’s disease. To better understand it and hope to treat it one day, his team is focusing its research on the functioning of what are called the “basal ganglia”. It is a set of brain gray matter, an area located under the cerebral cortex, deep below our two hemispheres of the brain, which plays an indirect role in the control of voluntary movements and the decision making on these movements. .
When these famous “basal ganglia” malfunction, we can lose the ability to perform certain movements or, on the contrary, have too many of them. This is the case, for example, in diseases such as Parkinson’s or Huntington’s. These nodes can also be disrupted in addictions such as drug addiction.
Professor Schiffman’s team was able to identify a receptor (called “A2A receptor of adenosine”), which, once blocked in a specific population of neurons, makes it possible to restore or at least improve the alteration of the movement of Parkinson’s disease : “It is in fact the possibility of improving the quality of movements when it is deficient in a disease, by targeting the regions which normally receive information from neurons which die or which degenerate.
These precious receivers, “when activated or inhibited, can alter the quality of movement. And in particular, there is one of them which controls the activity of this group of neurons and which therefore allows, when it is blocked, to be able to restore a little more adequate motor skills in a patient who suffers from Parkinson’s disease.”
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