NEW YORK (Dispatches) -- Study shows that during endurance, or aerobic, exercise, a hormone is secreted into the blood which reduces levels of a protein linked to Parkinson’s disease and stops movement problems in mice.
In new study , researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston found that endurance exercise alleviates symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. They say that one of the first clues to the link between exercise, Parkinson’s disease and Irisin came from Dana Farber’s Bruce Spiegelman, Ph.D., whose first paper about Irisin was published in 2012 in Nature and subsequently in other scientific journals, showing that a protein called an Irisin peptide is released into the blood and increases with endurance exercise.
Dawson and Spiegelman’s teams began with a research model used by Dawson in which mouse brain cells are engineered to spread small, spindly fibers of alpha synuclein, a protein that regulates moods and movements related to the brain neurotransmitter dopamine.