Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0030567 (Parkinson's disease)
 63,064 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

This study measured brain atrophy in patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease and diffuse Lewy body disease, all of whom had equivalent loss of midbrain dopammergic neurons and absence of Alzheimer's disease. Characteristic patterns of volume loss were found throughout the brain, depending on the age of onset and clinical signs. An equivalent loss of medial temporal lobe structures occurred in all parkinsonian patients. This atrophy was similar in magnitude to that seen in Alzheimer's disease and is likely to be the anatomical substrate for the memory deficits found in each of these patients groups. Frontal lobe atrophy was a feature of both late-onset Parkinson's disease (mild atrophy) and diffuse Lewy body disease (significant atrophy) groups, with all cases analyzed having dementia. Atrophy of frontal lobes correlated with the duration of motor symptoms in these patients and may suggest an association between dopammergic deafferentation, frontal atrophy and dementia.
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PMID:Regional brain atrophy in idiopathic parkinson's disease and diffuse Lewy body disease. 891 36

Frontal lobe dysfunction and other cognitive deficits have been described in Parkinson's disease (PD), which may lead to dementia. Both striatal dopaminergic deficiency and regional or global brain volume loss have been suggested to contribute to cognitive decline in PD. We therefore performed a neuropsychological evaluation, structural brain MRI and Fdopa PET in patients with PD and healthy elderly volunteers. PD patients had impaired cognitive performance in many neuropsychological tests compared to controls, not limited just to frontal lobe function tests. Caudate Fdopa correlated positively with performance in verbal (immediate and delayed) and visual memory. Patients with PD showed atrophy in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex and hippocampal atrophy was related to impaired memory. Our findings suggest that striatal dopaminergic depletion and global brain volume loss contribute to cognitive impairment in non-demented PD patients, but dysfunction of extra-striatal dopaminergic or non-dopaminergic systems probably plays a role especially in more generalized cognitive impairment.
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PMID:Impaired cognitive performance in Parkinson's disease is related to caudate dopaminergic hypofunction and hippocampal atrophy. 1843 33