Parkinson's brain cell transplants last for years

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Transplants of brain cells given to Parkinson's disease patients survive for 10 years or more, three teams of researchers reported on Sunday, but at least some of the transplants were damaged.

The researchers disagree about whether this damage shows that Parkinson's disease is a long-term, ongoing process that continues to attack the brain into old age, or the result of the transplants themselves.

But they agree that their studies, published in the journal Nature Medicine, demonstrate the benefits of the sometimes controversial brain cell transplants.

"I think these findings lend much optimism to future work," said Dr. Ole Isacson of McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, who worked on one of the studies.

Parkinson's disease, which affects more than a million patients in the United States alone, is marked by the death of brain cells that produce dopamine, a message-carrying chemical associated with movement. Drugs can delay symptoms for a while but there is no good treatment and no cure.

Patients report shakiness, which progresses to paralysis and sometimes dementia and death.

A few teams tried transplanting brain cells, some from aborted fetuses, to replace cells destroyed by the disease.

Jeffrey Kordower of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and colleagues described the case of a 61-year-old woman who died 14 years after she got a transplant.