BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Prevention or disease‐modifying therapies are critical for
the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's
disease and Huntington's disease. However, no such intervention is currently available.
Growing evidence has demonstrated that administration of histone deacetylase (HDAC)
inhibitors ameliorates a wide range of neurologic and psychiatric disorders in experimental
models. Suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA) was the first HDAC inhibitor approved by …

Parkinson's disease (PD), the second most common neurodegenerative disorder (Fahn,
2005), is characterized by selective and progressive loss of dopamine (DA) neurons in the
substantia nigra (SN)(Dauer et al., 2003). Current PD drugs like levodopa only relieve
symptoms, but fail to stop disease progression in patients. Difficulties in developing disease-
modifying drugs for halting the disease progression are mainly due to (1) the mechanisms of
disease etiology and progression are not fully understood,(2) lack of suitable progressive …