Because of the pharmacologic effects of ACh and dopamine, it was originally postulated by Ehringer and Hornykiewicz (the latter originated the idea) that a functional equilibrium exists in the striatum between the excitatory activity of ACh and the inhibitory activity of dopamine. In Parkinson disease, the decreased release of dopamine by the substantia nigra onto the striatum disinhibits neurons that synthesize ACh, resulting in a predominance of cholinergic activity—a notion supported by the observation that parkinsonian symptoms are aggravated by centrally acting cholinergic drugs and improved by anticholinergic drugs. According to this theory, administration of anticholinergic drugs restores the ratio between dopamine and ACh, with the new equilibrium being set at a lower-than-normal level because the striatal levels of dopamine are low to begin with. This view has been validated in clinical practice in that one observes a beneficial effect on parkinsonian symptoms after the administration of anticholinergic agents. The use of drugs that enhance dopamine synthesis or its release, or that directly stimulate dopaminergic receptors in the striatum (e.g., pramipexole), represents another more direct method of treating Parkinson disease as outlined in Chap. 38.
The Pathology of Basal Ganglionic Disease
The extrapyramidal motor syndrome as we know it today was first delineated on clinical grounds and so named by S.A.K. Wilson in 1912. In the disease that now bears his name and that he called hepatolenticular degeneration, the most striking abnormality was a bilaterally symmetrical degeneration of the putamen, sometimes to the point of cavitation. To these lesions Wilson correctly attributed the characteristic symptoms of rigidity and tremor. Shortly thereafter, van Woerkom described a similar clinical syndrome in a patient with acquired liver disease (Wilson’s cases were familial), the most prominent lesions again consisting of foci of neuronal degeneration in the striatum. Clinicopathologic studies of Huntington chorea—beginning with those of Meynert (1871) and followed by those of Jelgersma (1908) and Alzheimer (1911)—related the excessive movements and rigidity characteristic of the disease to a loss of nerve cells in the striatum. In 1920, Oskar and Cecile Vogt gave a detailed account of the neuropathologic changes in several patients who had been afflicted with choreoathetosis since early infancy; the changes, which they described as a “status fibrosus” or “status dysmyelinatus,” were confined to the caudate and lenticular nuclei. Surprisingly, it was not until 1919 that Tretiakoff demonstrated the underlying cell loss of the substantia nigra in cases of what was then called paralysis agitans and is now known as Parkinson disease. Finally, a series of observations, culminating with those of J. Purdon Martin and later of Mitchell and colleagues, related hemiballismus to lesions in the subthalamic nucleus of Luys and its immediate connections. While these observations have been invaluable, it has become apparent from clinical work that none of the relationships between anatomic loci and movement disorders are exclusive and the same movement disorder can result from lesions at one of several sites.