New perspectives in iron chelation therapy for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

Neurodegenerative diseases with an iron accumulation component: A wide variety of neurological diseases are characterized by the accumulation of iron in different areas of the central nervous system, include Parkinson’s disease, Huntington disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Friedreich’s ataxia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration and other neuropathologies associated with brain iron accumulation (Hayflick et al., 2018). In this perspective, we focus on Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the death of dopaminergic neurons of the sustantia nigra pars compacta, which results in the decreased release of the neurotransmitter dopamine at the centers of movement control in the striatum. These neurons are particularly vulnerable to degeneration because of their extensive branching and the large amounts of energy required to keep ionic gradients along this network: a prototype sustantia nigra dopaminergic neuron is estimated to have an average total neuritic tree length of about 4.5 meters and to give rise to 1–2.4 million synapses (Mamelak, 2018).