A ceramic blanket being developed improve blood flow and speed up wound healing has shown potential as an innovative treatment for Parkinson’s disease.
The blanket, developed by Gladiator Therapeutics, improved motor performance in a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease in a recent study.
The blanket also appeared to increase number of cells in the striatum and substantia nigra, two brain regions affected by Parkinson’s.
The researchers wrote: “The significant increase in cell volume in healthy wild mice may represent a unique method for the prevention of neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s disease.”
Parkinson’s causes a range of motor symptoms, including tremor and poor balance.
Patients can experience freezing of gait, where they feel stuck to the floor and unable to take a step forward.
The idea to test Gladiator’s ceramic blanket for Parkinson’s came about when researchers at Orlando’s University of Central Florida College of Medicine used one on a patient with a hard to treat wound.
Previous mouse studies found that wounds healed faster when exposed to the ceramic.
As well as their wound healing faster, the Parkinson’s patient reported that hand tremor and gait freezing had decreased.
According to researchers, the emitted far-infrared radiation can enter deep into the body’s cells and promote healing, prevent tissue damage, boost cell energy, enhance blood flow and oxygenation and reduce inflammation.
In the study, the researchers used a Parkinson’s mouse model where the gene coding for alpha-synuclein carries a mutation, called A53T, which is known to cause early-onset familial Parkinson’s in humans.
The protein forms toxic clumps in Parkinson’s, causing the death of dopamine-producing brain cells.
Dopamine plays a key role in movement and the loss of it causes symptoms of Parkinson’s.
A53T mice and healthy mice were housed in cages and placed on top of a ceramic blanket for a month.
A control group was housed in cages without the ceramic blanket.
It took significantly longer for the mice exposed to the ceramic blanket to fall off a rotating rod (66 vs. 49 seconds) compared to to control group.
A similar effect was observed in healthy mice (174 compared to 170 seconds).
The ceramic blanket not only improved motor performance, increasing the time spent on the rotarod by about 25 per cent, but also eased slowness of movement, the researchers said.
When the number of dopamine-positive brain cells in the striatum and substantia nigra were counted, the researchers found A535T mice exposed to the ceramic blanket had a 69.80 per cent increase over nontreated A53T animals.
The treated animals had “19.75 per cent more cells than the healthy wild control mice,” the researchers said.
The healthy mice treated with the ceramic blanket also had 72.83 per cent more cells than the non-treated mice.
The researchers attributed the positive effects to the capacity of far-infrared radiation to induce nitric oxide, a molecule capable of reducing cellular damage as well as inflammation.
The researchers noted this type of radiation can also improve mitochondrial function.
Mitochondria cell dysfunction is associated with developing Parkinson’s.
The ceramic blanket is now being tested in models of Alzheimer’s, traumatic brain injury, and heart failure.
