Investigation of non-invasive focused ultrasound efficacy on depressive-like behavior in hemiparkinsonian rats.

Depression is a common non-motor symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD) that includes anhedonia and impacts quality of life but is not effectively treated with conventional antidepressants clinically. Vagus nerve stimulation improves treatment-resistant depression in the general population, but research about its antidepressant efficacy in PD is limited. Here, we administered peripheral non-invasive focused ultrasound to hemiparkinsonian ('PD') and non-parkinsonian (sham) rats to mimic vagus nerve stimulation and assessed its antidepressant-like efficacy.

Time to initiation of symptomatic treatment in untreated Parkinson disease in the Parkinson progression marker initiative cohort: A 10-year follow up.

Background: Initiation of symptomatic therapy in Parkinson disease is a disease progression milestone, and its prediction is important. Previous studies were limited in duration and number of variables included in their predictive models.

Objectives: To identify predictors of time to initiation of symptomatic therapy in patients with PD not on treatment, using a large pool of candidate variables from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative dataset, analyzed at ten years.

Assessing the Location, Relative Expression and Subclass of Dopamine Receptors in the Cerebellum of Hemi-Parkinsonian Rats.

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease with loss of dopaminergic neurons in the nigrostriatal pathway resulting in basal ganglia (BG) dysfunction. This is largely why much of the preclinical and clinical research has focused on pathophysiological changes in these brain areas in PD. The cerebellum is another motor area of the brain.