A remarkable change takes place in the brains of tiny songbirds every year, and some day the mechanism controlling that change may help researchers develop treatments for age-related degenerative diseases of the brain such as Parkinson’s and dementia.

People with a certain gene mutation are more likely to get Parkinson’s disease before the age of 50 compared to those without the gene abnormality, according to a study published in the September 18, 2007, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Oxidative stress is known to underlie many human diseases including atherosclerosis, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. A team of scientists from Boston College has found a means to discover more about what role oxidative stress plays in the development of diseases by studying it at the sub-cellular level.

In our aging society, with an increased urgency to develop new compounds that target serious illnesses like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, memory enhancement drugs are becoming a big business. But these same drugs are also creating a growing ethical controversy over their potential off-label uses, such as taking these drugs as “performance enhancers” to gain a competitive advantage in the workplace.

Women who have their ovaries removed before menopause are at an increased risk of developing memory problems or dementia and movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, according to two studies published August 29, 2007, in the online edition of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Duke University chemists are developing ways to bind up iron in the brain to combat the neurological devastation of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. The key is to weed out potentially destructive forms of iron that generate harmful free radicals while leaving benign forms of iron alone to carry out vital functions in the body.

New evidence indicates that the loss of two types of brain cells--not just one as previously thought--may trigger the onset of symptoms associated with Parkinson's disease.

A multi-institutional team of researchers led by Emory University has defined for the first time how metal ions bind to amyloid fibrils in the brain in a way that appears toxic to neurons. Amyloid fibrils are linked to the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

The stranglehold of nicotine addiction leads to more than four million smoking-related deaths each year. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have now explained two roots of that addiction. The discoveries may offer new hope not just for smokers, but eventually also for sufferers of Parkinson's disease, a debilitating movement disorder that affects some 40 million people worldwide.

A University of Nottingham researcher has been awarded more than £440,000 by the Parkinson's Disease Society (PDS) to investigate the causes of the condition.

Rice University physicists have unveiled an innovative way of finding out how proteins get their shape based on how they unfold when pulled apart. The experimental method could be of widespread use in the field of protein folding science, which has grown dramatically in the past decade, due in part to the discovery that misfolded proteins play a key role in diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Statins are not all equal when it comes to their potential to guard against dementia, according to a study published in the online open access journal BMC Medicine. Statins are cholesterol-lowering drugs used by those with heart disease. The new findings suggest that simvastatin is associated with a lower incidence of dementia and Parkinson’s disease.