FILE – Barbara Hanson and Dr. Igor Koralnik in the lab. (Credit: Northwestern Medicine)
Researchers in Chicago believe they’ve found a virus that could be a trigger for Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s impacts millions of people in the United States, according to Northwestern Medicine, and while some cases are linked to genetics, most cases are not.
“We wanted to investigate potential environmental factors – such as viruses – that might contribute to Parkinson’s disease,” said Igor Koralnik, MD, the lead author of the study and chief of neuroinfectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine.
ViroFind used to detect HPgV
Researchers at Northwestern Medicine found the Human Pegivirus (HPgV) using ViroFind in the brains of individuals who had Parkinson’s disease.
HPgV belongs to a family of blood-borne illnesses like hepatitis C, but it is not known to cause any diseases.
Dig deeper:
Researchers used samples from over 1,000 participants in the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative, a foundation launched by The Michael J. Fox Foundation and other scientists.
Ten brains from post-mortem patients with Parkinson’s disease and 14 without were observed.
Five out of the 10 post-mortem brains with Parkinson’s had HPgV while the other 14 control brains had none.
The virus was also present in the spinal fluid of Parkinson’s patients but not in the control group.
What they’re saying:
“HPgV is a common, symptomless infection previously not known to frequently infect the brain,” Koralnik said. “We were surprised to find it in the brains of Parkinson’s patients at such high frequency and not in the controls. Even more unexpected was how the immune system responded differently, depending on a person’s genetics. This suggests it could be an environmental factor that interacts with the body in ways we didn’t realize before. For a virus that was thought to be harmless, these findings suggest it may have important effects, in the context of Parkinson’s disease. It may influence how Parkinson’s develops, especially in people with certain genetic backgrounds.”
LRRK2
Researchers also found a potential link between the LRRK2 gene mutation and how patients with Parkinson’s responded to the virus.
“People who had the virus showed different signals from the immune system than those who didn’t, and this pattern was the same, no matter the genetics. But as we followed each person over time, we saw a more complicated picture,” Koralnik continued.
What’s next:
Researchers said going forward, they plan to look more closely at how genes like LRRK2 impact the body’s response to other viral infections to figure out if this is a special effect of HPgV or a broader response to viruses.
There are also plans to dig deeper into how common the HPgV virus is in Parkinson’s patients and whether it plays a role in the disease.
The Source: Information for this article was taken from a Northwestern Medicine news release.