HARWELL’S space-age Diamond science facility is being used in a bid to shed light on the causes of Parkinson’s Disease.
Scientists from Keele University have been using the technology at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) site to fire powerful light beams into diseased brain tissue samples.
The result is the ground-breakling ‘mapping’ of brain cells, which they hope could lead to early detection of the degenerative brain condition, which is believed to affect up to 1,000 people in Oxfordshire.
Parkinson’s Disease affects movements such as walking and talking, and occurs as result of an unexplained loss of nerve cells in the brain.
Trevor Rayment, director of physical sciences at the Diamond scientific facility, said: “At the moment the best tool for understanding complex diseases like Parkinson’s is MRI, which is fantastic for the pictures it gives us of changes in people’s brains.
“However, the difficulty is finding out what these changes mean and how to interpret them.
“The research carried out by Dr Joanna Collingwood from Keele University here at Diamond, is a small but very important part of the jigsaw in involved in understanding diseases like Parkinson’s.
“Dr Collingwood has used the Diamond Light Source to look at the distribution of metal in brain cells affected by Parkinson’s and found that levels of iron can nearly double in cells affected by the disease.
“This ‘mapping’ has helped her to not only see the distribution of metal in the brain, but also the form of that metal.
“And this could bring us a better understanding of the pictures given by MRI and perhaps mean better diagnoses of the disease in the future.”
Dr Collingwood presented some of her research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago last week.
Campbell Ferguson, chairman of Oxford and District branch of the Parkinson’s Disease Society, said: “We don’t know the exact number of Parkinson’s sufferers in Oxfordshire, but we think there may be as many as 1,000.
“We are hoping to be visited from someone at the Harwell facility to talk to us about this exciting research further.”
dwaite@oxfordmail.co.uk
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