On Parkinson's As Faster Aging
A slightly different take on recent research into Parkinson's disease and mitochondria can be found at the Daily Progress: "In one sense, the disease may represent a premature aging of the nervous system ... In aging, what happens over time is the rate at which you produce oxygen free radicals exceeds the rate at which you can detoxify them ... for some reason, he said, people with Parkinson's have more damage from free radicals ... Bennett hopes that as he learns more [he] can begin to test a drug that would absorb the free radicals in the neuronal mitochondria and stop the damage they cause. He also hopes to develop a way to test mitochondrial damage in other tissues or cells, such as in blood platelets, to come up with an earlier way to test for Parkinson’s. The disease can only be diagnosed currently when symptoms begin to appear, which Elliott said occurs after 70 percent to 80 percent of the dopamine cells have already been lost."