Steroids could be used to treat a debilitating disease that affects thousands in Wales today.
Researchers at a university in Wales have highlighted the controversial substance’s positive side after discovering two steroid type molecules that could treat Parkinson’s disease.
Professor William J Griffiths and Dr Yuqin Wang at Swansea University’s Institute of Mass Spectrometry, both experts in identifying biomolecules, believe the find could lead to some of Parkinson’s effects being reversed using regenerative medicine.
The cruel disease has affected boxing legend Muhammad Ali and actor Bob Hoskins, who last year announced he was ending his career because of Parkinson’s.
The brain condition, with symptoms including tremors, mood changes, movement difficulties, loss of smell and speech problems, affects almost 130,000 people in the UK.
Later, cognitive and behavioural problems may arise as the disease takes hold, with dementia commonly occurring in its advanced stages.
Parkinson’s motor symptoms result from the death of dopamine-generating cells in the substantia nigra, a region of the mid-brain.
The two Swansea researchers working with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, have now identified two steroid-type molecules that play an important role in the survival and production of nerve cells in the mid-brain.
The discovery has been published online in the international journal Nature Chemical Biology and may prove significant in the treatment of several diseases as well as Parkinson’s.
Dr Wang said: “The first molecule we found, cholic acid, influences the production and survival of neurons in what is known as the red nucleus, important for incoming signals from other parts of the brain.
“The other molecule, 24S,25-epoxycholesterol, influences the generation of new dopamine-producing nerve cells, which are important in controlling movement.”
One particularly important conclusion is that the second molecule discovered, 24S,25-epoxycholesterol, could be used to turn stem cells into mid-brain dopamine-producing nerve cells, the type killed off by Parkinson’s.
Dr Wang said: “This finding opens the possibility of using steroid-type molecules in future re-generative medicine, since new dopamine-producing cells created in the laboratory could be used for transplantation to patients with Parkinson’s disease.”
The work at Swansea, supported by the UK Research Councils’ Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), highlights the “good” side of steroids.
Around 100,000 people across the UK are now thought to be using anabolic steroids despite side-effects including liver and heart problems, premature hair loss and shrinking testicles plus mood changes.
Users claim if taken correctly they can help people get bigger muscles within weeks, instead of months.
But the Government and health experts insists anabolic steroids are harmful.
However, steroids are a group of medications that have very powerful anti inflammatory properties and can treat a large range of illnesses. They are used to control chronic conditions such as eczema and arthritis, as well as calming down the immune system when it is overactive – in hay fever, for example.
These drugs are different from the anabolic steroids taken by sportsmen to enhance performance which are a synthetic version of natural hormones that exist in the body known as corticosteroids. The synthetic anabolic steroids are similar to the male sex hormone testosterone which builds up muscle bulk in the body.
Prof Griffiths said: “The steroids used by body-builders are of the same chemical class as those produced in the body that we’ve been looking at. But apart from that they are very different.
“Steroids are in a sense good and bad, and what our work had done is to focus on their good side.
“Our next step now is to work with clinicians who are hoping, in the future, to come up with effective treatment for conditions like Parkinson’s.
“It’s part of the ‘laboratory to the bedside’ route and our role after this discovery will be to interpret our findings for the doctors.”
Regarding the use of regenerative medicince to treat Parkinson’s, he added: “That’s a long way off as our discovery as bench scientists has only just been made.
“But the fact we now know these molecules exists means those in the field of regenerative medicine can get to work on them.”