Medical professor receives grant

A professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine recently received a $6.5 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to study the influence of pesticides on Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Marie-Francoise Chesselet, chair of the neurobiology department, and other professors at UCLA’s Morris K. Udall Parkinson Disease Center for Excellence will use the grant money to continue research that started five years ago.

The work they had done found a connection between a person’s exposure to pesticides and their likelihood of acquiring Parkinson’s disease.

“We have strong evidence that exposure to pesticides increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease,” Chesselet said. “Pesticides affect specific biological processes which increases the risk of Parkinson’s.”

Parkinson’s disease affects 1.5 million Americans and occurs when certain neurons in the brain become impaired, causing tremors and muscle rigidity, according to the National Parkinson Foundation Web site.

UCLA professor of epidemiology Beate Ritz has been researching Parkinson’s patients and their exposure to pesticides for the last five years.

With the help of many undergraduates, she collected data on patients in Southern California that were diagnosed with Parkinson’s between 1998 and 2007.

Then they used information from the Pesticide Use Database to geographically plot out what pesticides have been sprayed and where and then they compared that to where the patients lived and worked.

The research is currently being analyzed and will be published soon, but they have, indeed, found a strong link between pesticide exposure and Parkinson’s.

But Ritz said there are other factors that affect whether someone acquires Parkinson’s.

“Obviously, everyone that is exposed to pesticides does not get Parkinson’s,” Ritz said. “There is a more susceptible population and we are looking at if there is a genetic susceptibility.”

The grant money will be used to continue this field research and will also be used for three other projects.

One of the projects involves studying flies to see how pesticides affect their neurons.

“We use the fly as a model organism to try to understand how pesticides can cause the death of neurons in humans,” said David Krantz, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine.

The project also introduces genes into the flies to see if certain genes cause the fly to be more susceptible to neuron damage when exposed to certain pesticides.

Another lab is studying genetically engineered mice and trying to model the genetic susceptibility in the mice to that found in humans. The third project exposes pesticides to human cellular models.

“There is a lot of going back and forth,” Ritz said, “Looking at the animals and cells and then looking to see if we see the same thing in the human population.”

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