Neuroprotective Strategies in Parkinson's Disease

This chapter focuses on neuroprotective therapies for Parkinson's disease (PD). PD patients inevitably develop disability despite currently available medical and surgical therapies. Accordingly, a neuroprotective therapy that slows or stops disease progression is an urgent requirement. While there are many promising candidate agents based on laboratory studies, the translation of a novel study intervention into a viable disease-modifying therapy has proven to be extremely difficult to achieve; to date, no agent has been determined to be neuroprotective by either regulatory authorities or physicians. Among the limiting factors are uncertainty as to the etiology and pathogenesis of cell death in PD and what precisely to target, a reliable animal model in which to test putative neuroprotective therapies, a method for accurately determining the optimal dose range to employ in clinical trials, and a clinical outcome measure that accurately reflects the status of the underlying disease state.