Parkinson's disease (PD) devastates 6.3 million people, ranking it as one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative motor disorders worldwide. PD patients may manifest symptoms of postural instability, bradykinesia, and resting tremors as a result of increasing α-synuclein aggregation and neuron death with disease progression. Therapy options are limited, and those available to patients may worsen their condition. Thus, investigations to understand disease progression may help develop therapeutic strategies for improvement of quality of life for patients suffering from PD. This review provides an overview of α-synuclein, a presynaptic neuronal protein whose function in the healthy brain and PD pathology remains a mystery. This review also focuses on calcium-induced activation of calpain, a neutral protease, and the subsequent cascade of cellular processing of α-synuclein and emerging defense responses observed in experimental models of PD: microglial activation, dysregulation of T cells, and inflammatory responses in the brain. In addition, this review discusses the events of cross presentation of synuclein peptides by professional antigen presenting cells and microglia, induction of inflammatory responses in the periphery and brain, and emerging calpain-targeted therapeutic strategies to attenuate neuronal death in PD.
Keywords: Alpha-synuclein; Calpain; Inflammation; Microglia; Neurodegeneration; Parkinson's disease; T cells.
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