Abstract
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, and there is still no effective way to stop its progress. Therefore, early detection is crucial for the prevention and the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. The current diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, however, mainly depends on the symptoms, so it is necessary to establish a reliable imaging modality for PD diagnosis and its progression monitoring. Other studies and our previous ones demonstrated that substantia nigra hyperechogenicity (SNH) was detected by transcranial sonography (TCS) in the ventral midbrain of PD patients, and SNH is regarded as a characteristic marker of PD. The present study aimed to explore whether SNH could serve as a reliable imaging modality to monitor the progression of dopaminergic neurodegeneration of PD. The results revealed that the size of SNH was positively related with the degree of dopaminergic neuron death in PD animal models. Furthermore, we revealed that microglia activation contributed to the SNH formation in substantia nigra (SN) in PD models. Taken together, this study suggests that SNH through TCS is a promising imaging modality to monitor the progression of dopaminergic neurodegeneration of PD.
Highlights
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease that is age-related and characterized by the loss of dopaminergic neurons and neuroinflammation in the substantia nigra (SN) (Olson et al, 2016)
By establishing a 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA)-induced unilateral PD rat model, we aimed to explore the relationship between substantia nigra hyperechogenicity (SNH) and dopaminergic neurodegeneration degree and primarily investigated the mechanism underlying SNH formation, with the hypothesis that SNH could serve as a reliable imaging modality to monitor the degree of dopaminergic neurodegeneration of PD
SNH Is Stably Observed in 6-OHDA PD Rat Models
Summary
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease that is age-related and characterized by the loss of dopaminergic neurons and neuroinflammation in the substantia nigra (SN) (Olson et al, 2016). A large amount of neuroprotective drugs are under investigation, such as nitidine, a pentacyclic alkaloid isolated from traditional herbal medicine Zanthoxylum nitidum (Roxb.) DC (Yuan et al, 2015), which could promote dopaminergic neuron survival by suppressing neuroinflammation (Wang et al, 2012, 2016; Yuan et al, 2015). The current diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease mainly depends on the symptoms, so it is necessary to establish a reliable imaging modality for PD diagnosis and its progression monitoring
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