Parkinson's Disease: An Insight into Mechanisms and Model Systems

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the most common, insidious motor-neurodegenerative disorder characterized by loss of dopaminergic neurons in substantia nigra pars compacta. In ancient Indian medical system of Ayurveda, the same pathology was documented as Kampavata, where, ‘Kampa’ refers to the ‘shaking’ or ‘tremors’ and ‘Vata’ stands for disease. PD affects the global population regardless race, clan, cast or socioeconomic barrier, with a prevalence rate of (0.3–0.8) %. More than 1 million people above the age of 60 years are affected by PD in USA alone. PD is associated with various risk factors including aging, genetic involvement and environmental neurotoxin exposure. Studies have shown that, experimental models are capable to recapitulate most of the PD symptoms, which showed imbalance in striatal neurochemistry of brain and alterations in neuroinflammatory markers, oxidative stress, neurotrophic factors and mitochondrial dysfunction. In the present review, we have accumulated all the recent updates on PD and provided a brief discussion on the toxin-induced animal models of PD.