": 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)

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