A new study out of Northwestern Medicine finds evidence of the human pegivirus in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease, but not in the brains of people without the neurological condition.
A usually harmless virus might be an environmental trigger or contributor to Parkinson’s disease, a new study suggests.
Researchers at Northwestern Medicine developed a tool called ‘ViroFind,’ which detects 565 viruses known to infect humans in a single assay or test.
They analyzed post-mortem brain samples from 10 people with Parkinson's disease and 14 control subjects who died from other causes.
“Using this assay, we found a specific virus called the human pegivirus, which is otherwise not known to cause disease, to be present in half of the patients’ brains who had Parkinson's disease compared to none of those control brain patients.”
Dr. Igor Koralnik, lead author of the study, says the infected brains exhibited more advanced disease, including increased tau pathology and altered levels of certain brain proteins.
Blood tests also revealed that patients with a certain Parkinson’s mutation – LRRK2 – respond differently to the virus compared to patients without the mutation.
Barbara Hanson, a post-doctoral fellow at Northwestern, says the human pegivirus is very closely related to hepatitis C, which can be treated with several antiviral medications.
“And so that's very interesting to us, that it means that there is something that might be able to treat pegivirus. There is a big question as to whether or not those antiviral medications would have the ability to enter the brain if we're talking about an infection that's actually occurring in the brain, so that is something that we intend to follow up on.”
But Dr. Koralnik stresses this is an exploratory study.
“It doesn't mean that those viruses cause the disease, but it suggests that they may be implicated on how the immune system reacts to those viruses that may be associated with the Parkinson's disease.”
Parkinson’s disease affects more than one million people in the United States.
Source: JCI Insight
Author Affiliations: Northwestern Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
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