Parkinson’s disease is a brain disorder that leads to restricted mobility, especially in older people, but can also slow down the thinking process. Scientists led by Professor Dr. Joseph Claßen of Leipzig University Hospital and Professor Dr. Thomas Knösche of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have now discovered with the help of a recent study that Parkinson’s can be read via signals from the scalp. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), the pathological changes can be read in five-minute measurements on the scalp by signal transmission. The new findings of the study are therefore an important building block for further research work with regard to diagnostics of the neurodegenerative disease and novel therapeutic approaches, as the experts explain. The causes of Parkinson’s disease, also known as shaking palsy, are unclear. However, it is known that electrical oscillations of nerve cells in the depths of the brain and the cerebral cortex lead to pathological couplings, which can be determined by means of EEG. However, the exact mechanisms have not yet been researched. However, it is suspected that the neuronal mechanisms also trigger the motor impairments through abnormal couplings. This is where further research with mathematical model calculations could come in, so that brain regions that coordinate movement control can be corrected with therapeutic measures such as magnetic or electrical stimulation from the outside without surgery. Indeed, the research teams also noticed that some Parkinson’s patients had pathological couplings in the frontal cortex that had nothing to do with motor impairments. Instead, those affected had cognitive disorders, i.e. their thinking was slowed down so that the experts are now looking for a common solution to the various forms of Parkinson’s disease. In the future, however, therapeutic approaches will probably be limited to the coupling of so-called beta and gamma signals as activity biomarkers, because these have a significance for pathologically altered body functions.
Source: heilpraxis.net