Last updated April 10, 2018 at 2:22 pm
Impressive breakthroughs are being made in Parkinson’s research.
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Research into Parkinson’s disease is moving “from hype to hope” but we must accept that we may never have a cure for the disease, according to leading Australian cognitive neuroscientist.
Professor Simon Lewis from the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre believes our priority should be to continue to focus on delivering the very best of care to patients with “whatever we can muster from our armoury”.
Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia, he suggests that while the pursuit of an effective treatment to slow, stop or reverse the disease is accelerating globally and our understanding is growing inexorably – making it an exciting time to be a researcher in the field – this has only served to reveal its ever increasing complexity.
“We need to find a cure for a disease for which we do not know the cause, have no diagnostic test, and strongly suspect is multifactorial, leading to significant heterogeneity.
“Two hundred years after its initial description, this is precisely where we find ourselves with Parkinson disease,” the article begins.
It then continues to highlight a number of promising areas of current and recent exploration, including the identification of epidemiological factors that increase or reduce risk and preclinical biomarkers.
The article published in the Medical Journal of Australia.
