Autoradiographic study on dopamine uptake sites and their correlation with dopamine levels and their striata from patients with Parkinson disease, Alzheimer disease, and neurologically normal controls.

An autoradiographic study of labeled mazindol binding to presumed dopamine (DA) uptake sites in the striatum was done in 7 Parkinson (PD), 6 Alzheimer (AD), 1 Huntington disease (HD), and 4 neurologically normal cases. Large and significant decreases of specific binding were found in PD in both caudate (to 32% of control) and putamen (to 16%), with no significant effect in AD or HD. Nonspecific binding was a large proportion of total binding in all cases. In the 12 cases where both binding data and DA levels were available, they showed highly significant linear correlations in both caudate and putamen. Autoradiographic studies on D1, D2, and muscarinic binding sites in the PD, AD and control striata revealed no significant group differences.