I'm looking specifically into dopaminergic cell death at the moment as I was on amphetamines for years and think I may have suffered some of the cytotoxicity associated with the drug. So I've been looking into Parkinsons disease related research and came across this article:
http://neuro-science...urogenesis.html
here is an excerpt:
The classical view is that this is the result of a progressive degeneration process triggered by unidentified pathogenic factors. This hypothesis was challenged in 2001 by Armstrong and Barker (2001) who proposed the concept that the dopaminergic population in the SNc undergoes a continuous turnover with a low rate of spontaneous neuronal cell loss and an equilibrated rate of constitutive neurogenesis to replace the lost neurons. According to this concept, the reduced number of dopaminergic neurons in the SNc in PD would result from a reduced rate of adult neurogenesis rather than by an increased rate of neuronal cell loss. In 2003, Zhao and coworkers presented experimental findings which suggested that new dopaminergic neurons would indeed be continuously born in the SNc of adult mice to replace spontaneously degenerating neurons. According to this hypothesis, the dopaminergic neuronal population in the SNc would undergo a complete turnover during the lifespan of a mouse. Since then, the hypothesis that the generation of new dopaminergic neurons in the adult SNc could occur spontaneously or as a consequence of lesion-induced repair-mechanisms has received much attention.
Maybe its just a false paradigm, the idea that brain damage is permanent. Research on neuroplasticity in recent years has been suggesting just that. Of course, this is what I want to believe since I'd prefer not to be brain damaged for life (if I actually have damaged dopaminergic pre-synaptic terminals in my brain) but from what I've read so far, I've good reason to be optimistic.
