Experimental gene therapy shows promise for Parkinson's disease.   The CBS Evening News (6/21, story 6, 2:30, Couric) reported, "For people who suffer from Parkinson's disease, a promising new experimental treatment that can ease the debilitating symptoms. It's a gene therapy that doesn't have the side effects of medications." CBS (Miller) added, "For the experiment, published in The Lancet today, doctors took a gene, packaged it into a harmless virus, and injected it directly into the brain. In theory, that gene calms down the abnormal activity. Of the 12 patients in the study, all of them showed at least a 25-percent improvement."
      NBC Nightly News (6/21, story 3, 2:00, Bazell) reported, "Surgeons at Cornell Medical Center in New York put new genes into brain cells of 12 patients. In each patient, doctors treated only one side of the brain. After as many as four years, they found improvement in all patients in the limbs controlled by the treated side of the brain."
      The New York Times /AP (6/22) reports that the "experimental gene therapy for Parkinson's disease seemed to improve symptoms without causing side effects in an early study of 12 patients." The treatment involved "slipping billions of copies of a gene into the brain to calm overactive circuitry." However, "experts cautioned that it was too soon to draw conclusions about how well it worked."
      HealthDay (6/22, Gardner) reports that the "current trial is the first-ever Phase I clinical trial looking at gene therapy against Parkinson's disease." Participants were "divided into three groups of four and given low-, medium- or high-dose injections of the glutamic acid decarboxylase gene directly into brain cells. The gene, which is involved in dopamine production, was transferred to the cells using an adeno-associated virus." There were no side effects "associated with the gene therapy and, although the study was not undertaken to show effectiveness, the researchers have noted improvements in movement within three months of the procedure. Brain scans showed changes in metabolism similar to those that occur after surgery for Parkinson's." The researchers said the "benefits were equivalent to improvements seen with deep brain stimulation, although deep brain stimulation is given to both sides of the brain, and the gene therapy was only given to one side of the brain because of concerns about side effects." MedPage Today (6/22, Osterweil) and WebMD (6/22, DeNoon) also report the study.
      Researchers identify potential new drug target to treat Parkinson's.   HealthDay (6/22, Preidt) reports that "researchers say they've identified a potential new drug target to treat Parkinson's disease." The scientists "found that blocking the action of an enzyme called SIRT2 helps protect neurons damaged in Parkinson's disease from the toxic effects of the protein alpha-synuclein, which accumulates in the brains of people with Parkinson's disease. Blocking SIRT2 may also help in the treatment of other neurodegenerative diseases in which abnormal proteins accumulate in the brain, the researchers said." Their findings appear online on the Science Express website and will be published in an upcoming print issue of the journal Science.

Study suggests eldest children in families may have higher IQs.   The New York Times (6/22, Carey) reports that "the eldest children in families tend to develop slightly higher IQs than their younger siblings, researchers are reporting, based on a large study that could effectively settle more than a half-century of scientific debate about the relationship between IQ and birth order." The new findings, in today's issue of Science, "are based on detailed records from 241,310 Norwegians, including some 64,000 pairs of brothers, allowing the researchers to carefully compare scores within families, as well as between families. The study found that eldest children scored about three points higher on IQ tests than their closest sibling. The difference was an average, meaning that it showed up in most families, but not all of them."
      The Los Angeles Times (6/22, Gellene) reports that the study "found the IQs of firstborns were two to three points higher than that of younger siblings." Although that "may not sound like a lot, experts said even a few IQ points could make a big difference over the course of a lifetime -- and set firstborns on a trajectory for success. UC Berkeley researcher Frank J. Sulloway, who wrote a commentary accompanying the study, said two to three IQ points could translate to an added 20 to 30 points on an SAT college entrance exam."
      The AP (6/22, Schmid) adds that the researchers "report that it isn't a matter of being born first, but growing up the senior child, that seems to result in the higher IQ scores." The findings provide "evidence that the relation between birth order and IQ score is dependent on the social rank in the family and not birth order as such," the researchers concluded. HealthDay (6/22, Reinberg) and WebMD (6/22, Hitti) also report the study.