New treatment promising for Parkinson's disease

From CTV News:
In what could be a breakthrough in the treatment of Parkinson's disease, an experimental treatment using gene therapy has delivered promising results, improving the symptoms of 12 patients.

The study was the first-ever on the use of gene therapy to battle Parkinson's disease, a disease marked by tremors, rigidity in their limbs, and slowness of movement.

In the small study of 11 men and one woman, surgeons from New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center injected a harmless gene-bearing virus into the brains of the patients. Over the course of one year, they found that the treatment improved motor function for Parkinson's patients without side effects. ...more