Mayo Clinic First to Test Low-Dose Radiation as a Way to Slow Parkinson’s Disease

Mayo Clinic has begun what it says is the first clinical trial anywhere to test low-dose radiation therapy as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, taking a tool normally associated with cancer care and aiming it at inflammation in the brain.

Radiation is best known as a cancer treatment, where high doses destroy tumour cells. The Mayo trial takes a deliberately different approach: much lower, carefully targeted doses, given in the hope of reducing the inflammation that researchers believe helps drive Parkinson’s. The study is enrolling people with early-stage disease.

Targeting a cause, not just the symptoms

Current Parkinson’s treatments mainly ease symptoms such as tremor, stiffness and slowness of movement, but none has been proven to slow the underlying disease. The Mayo team wants to test whether calming inflammation in the affected brain areas could change that trajectory.

Yasamin Sharifzadeh, a Mayo Clinic radiation oncologist and the trial’s principal investigator, explained that inflammation is believed to play an important role in how Parkinson’s develops. Rather than only treating the symptoms patients experience, the researchers are investigating whether low-dose radiation can influence one of the biological processes behind the disease and thereby slow how quickly symptoms worsen.

Early days for a new idea

The trial is at an early stage, and the researchers are not claiming the approach works — only that it is now being formally tested in patients for the first time. If the concept proves safe and shows signs of benefit, it could open an entirely new treatment direction for a disease that affects more than a million people in the United States alone.

For now, patients and families are advised to watch for published results rather than seek the treatment outside the trial, since its risks and benefits in Parkinson’s remain unknown.

Source: South Florida Hospital News