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Nature Medicine 14, 483 - 485 (2008)
doi:10.1038/nm1768

Assessing fetal nerve cell grafts in Parkinson's disease

Heiko Braak1 & Kelly Del Tredici1

  1. Heiko Braak and Kelly Del Tredici are at the Institute for Clinical Neuroanatomy, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Theodor Stern Kai 7, 60590 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
    e-mail: Braak@em.uni-frankfurt.de


Three postmortem studies examine long-term fetal transplants in subjects with advanced Parkinson's disease. The findings—such as the development of parkinsonian pathology in some transplanted neurons—underscore the limitations of this approach.


One of the pathological features of Parkinson's disease is a loss of dopaminergic nerve cells in the substantia nigra, a nucleus of the midbrain. Cells in this region project to the striatum, a subcortical brain region that works closely together with the cerebral cortex.

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