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Dr. Lowe, from In The Pipeline, wrote Parkinson's As An Autoimmune Disease: More Evidence:
For many complex diseases, you'll find that there are a couple of hypotheses floating around them that are hard to prove and hard to disprove: one is that they're actually caused by some (as yet unrecognized) infectious agent, and the other is that that they're actually an autoimmune/inflammatory disorder. You can also recognize that these two can have features in common, as seen in something like Guillian-Barré syndrome, where a (usually innocuous and often hardly noticed) viral infection or other stimulus can lead to a sudden autoimmune crisis. A whole list of conditions have had such explanations attached to them, more or less persuasively: Alzheimer's, obesity, various forms of arthritis (with little doubt on the autoimmune side), diabetes (Type I, certainly, but even Type II), multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, and more. Those links lead mainly to autoimmune explanations, but infectious-agent hypotheses are found quite easily as well, and going back many years.
A new paper adds what might be strong evidence to the Parkinson's explanation. It's been known for some time that there's an association between the disease and MHC (major histocompatibility complex) alleles although (at the same time) having another autoimmune disease doesn't seem to raise the risk for Parkinson's itself. That's interesting, in that the brain has mostly been thought of as an "immunoprivileged" compartment, but it's also been increasingly clear that this doctrine is not as solid as it might be.
From the research article:
Approximately 40% of the participants with Parkinson's disease in our cohort exhibited immune responses to α-syn epitopes, and these responses may reflect variations in disease progression or environmental factors. The fraction of patients who display these responses in classic autoimmune disorders such as type-1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis is often around 20–50%. As with type-1 diabetes, which features epitopes that are derived from both preproinsulin and additional proteins, it may be that epitopes related to Parkinson's disease are derived from α-syn and additional proteins.
In short, the researchers found that the immune system in patients with Parkinson's disease can recognize the protein associated with it and induce a response that will kill neurons. If Parkinson's disease is autoimmune, then current therapies for other autoimmune diseases may also be relevant for Parkinson's disease.
Research Article: https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v546/n7660/full/nature22815.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune_disease
Previous discussion of Multiple Sclerosis treatment: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/06/13/1038232
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday July 01 2017, @02:57AM
Probably anything that reduces inflammatory response would help, simply because the immune system then gets less stimulation and produces fewer antibodies.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.