Yeah well I enjoy ranting but have gotten to do ever so little of it thus far on Wikepedia because of the whole infernal Wikiquette thing I couldn t resist the opportunity to indulge a little Here s the dilly or part of it on dopamine melanin and Parkinson s Dopamine and melanin have very similar structures and dopamine metabolism produces a form of melanin called neuromelanin which is different from eumelanin pheomelanin et cetera but still certainly a melanin Neuromelanin gradually accumulates in the neurons of the substantia nigra throughout a person s life Kids have very little elderly people have lots When people get Parkinson s they start losing their neuromelanin and their SN goes pale The fairly recently published histology and pathology books I m using just take it for granted that the loss of neuromelanin is basically a side effect of dopamine depletion But I may have been a little too confident in assuming that that s the final word I just checked the National Library of Medicine website and a bunch of new research is turning up more immediate connections between neuromelanin and Parkinson s than had been suspected Also it looks like they re also getting promising results in studies on therapies that involve endocrine manipulation of neuromelanin Still all of this specifically involves neuromelanin in the dopaminergic neurons of the SN and I haven t personally learned heard or run across anything stating that there is any connection whatsoever between skin melanin and Parkinson s But I guess the take home message for me is that there is more going on here than I realized so I can t write off the possibility that there is alsothough I can t imagine howsome emerging connection between neuromelanin Parkinson s and a person s skin melanin levels Anyway as you say this article is about melanin generally not just skin melanin in humans so regardless the Parkinson s link is legit 19 57 14 Feb 2005 UTC