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Cancer drug can reverse Parkinson's

A new hope for people suffering from Parkinson's disease and dementia.

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A groundbreaking new study has found that a drug that is typically used to battle leukaemia could help Parkinson's or dementia patients. 

Parkinson's disease is a chronic and progressive movement disorder of the nervous system marked by tremor, muscular rigidity, and slow, imprecise movement, chiefly affecting middle-aged and elderly people and dementia is a chronic disorder of the mental processes caused by brain disease or injury and marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning.

The FDA-approved drug for leukaemia improved cognition, motor skills and non-motor function in patients with Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia in a small phase I clinical trial, report researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) in Washington. 

Researcher Fernando Pagan said that this study represents the first time a therapy appears to reverse(to a greater or lesser degree depending on stage of disease) cognitive and motor decline in patients with these neurodegenerative disorders, but it is critical to conduct a more comprehensive studies before determining the drug's true impact. Although all the volunteers were at an advanced stage of disease at the start of the trial, and three of them were unable to speak, all of them started to improve once they started taking the drug, some as little as three weeks later. The drug however costs a whopping $10,000 a month.

Complete data has been presented at Neuroscience 2015, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Chicago.

 

 

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