A study at the MedUni Vienna’s Centre for Brain Research, led by Christian Pifl and the well known Parkinson´s researcher Oleh Hornykiewicz, compared the brains of deceased Parkinson's patients with those of a neurologically healthy control group. For the first time, it was possible to prepare the dopamine-storing vesicles from the brains so that their ability to store dopamine by pumping it in could be measured in quantitative terms.

More than 50 years ago, in the Institute of Pharmacology at the University of Vienna (now the MedUni Vienna), Herbert Ehringer and Oleh Hornykiewicz discovered that Parkinson’s disease is caused by a lack of dopamine in certain regions of the brain. However, the reasons for the death of nerve cells in Parkinson's disease are not yet fully understood.

With human specific methods, the researchers have made important progress to come closer to clarify this mechanism.

Source press release from 16th of June 14:
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/life-sciences/hunting-down-the-trigger-for-parkinson-s-failing-dopamine-pump-damages-brain-cells.html

Original publication:
Christian Pifl, Alex Rajput, Harald Reither, Javier Blesa, Carmen Cavada, José A. Obeso, Ali H. Rajput, Oleh Hornykiewicz – Is Parkinson’s disease a vesicular dopamine storage disorder? Evidence from a study in isolated synaptic vesicles of human and non-human primate striatum. Journal of Neuroscience