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  3. An experimental treatment for Parkinson’s disease seemed to improve symptoms—

An experimental treatment for Parkinson’s disease seemed to improve symptoms—

游客2023-12-22  53
问题    An experimental treatment for Parkinson’s disease seemed to improve symptoms—dramatically so, for one 59-year-old man—without causing side effects in an early study of a dozen patients. The gene therapy treatment involved slipping billions of copies of a gene into the brain to calm overactive brain circuitry. More than half a million Americans have Parkinson’s. They endure symptoms that include tremors, rigidity in their limbs, slowness of movement and impaired balance and coordination. Eventually they can become severely disabled.
The small study focused on testing the safety of the procedure rather than its effectiveness, and experts cautioned it’s too soon to draw conclusions about how well it works. But they called the results promising and said the approach merits further studies. "We still have quite a bit more testing to do," said Dr. Michael Kaplitt of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, an author of the study. Still, "the initial results are extremely encouraging".
   Nathan Klein, a 59-year-old freelance television producer in Port Washington, N.Y., said the disease left him "pretty messed up". It weakened his voice, impaired his walking and made his hand tremble so badly he couldn’t hold a glass of wine without spilling it all. Klein was the first patient to be treated with Kaplitt’s gene therapy procedure in 2003, and he said his symptoms gradually subsided afterward. Nowadays, he said, apart from freezing now and then when he wants to walk, the symptoms are basically gone. "I’m elated," said Klein, who continues to take his regular pills for the disease. "It’s unbelievable."
   Kaplitt, who has a financial interest in Neurologix Inc., which paid for the research, noted that the 12 patients in the study still have Parkinson’s symptoms. The amount of medication they were already taking for their symptoms didn’t change significantly in the year after the surgery. Current medicines can control symptoms, but can’t stop the disease from getting worse over time, and they can produce troublesome side effects like uncontrollable movement.
   Some patients gain relief from a surgical treatment called deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are placed in the brain and connected to a programmable stimulator. Kaplitt’s procedure was aimed at achieving the same goal as that surgery, calming overactive circuitry in the brain. It gets overactive because it loses the normal supply of a chemical called GABA. The gene therapy was designed to make the brain produce more GABA.
   For the gene therapy surgery, a tube about the width of a hair was threaded through a hole about the size of a quarter at the top of the skull. The tube delivered a dose of a virus engineered to ferry copies of a gene into cells of a brain region called the subthalamic nucleus. The gene copies enable the cells to pump out more GABA. [br] The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are as follows EXCEPT______.
选项 A、tremors
B、stiffness in patients’ limbs
C、slowness of movement
D、impaired thinking ability
答案 D
解析
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