Online and in the news: Parkinson's disease

INSIDE LOOK: Tens of millions are invested into Parkinson’s disease research every year but we still don’t know where it starts. 

But according to the Journal of Experimental Medicine, a laboratory model of Parkinson’s — which the late Muhammad Ali (right) battled for many years — is giving scientists an inside look at what happens in the brain years before motor symptoms appear.

Specifically, it demonstrates how abnormal alpha-synuclein proteins gradually spread from an area of the brain implicated in the early stages of the disease to other regions of the brain ultimately damaged by the disease.