dopamine agonist

This Week’s Highlights: Battling neurotransmitters; Interrupted Sleep - why recent changes in Restless Legs treatment may be relevant for some with PD; acetylcholine’s role in PD symptoms; Why Hope Is Important; PD Summer School; positive deviancy; magic therapy; Judas Priest; research briefs & more ...

This Week's Highlights: Help us build a better website; new study says “sexercise is medicine” for men with early Parkinson’s disease; the keto diet might be a good idea for PD, but proceed with caution; Dopamine agonists might be linked to hair loss, particularly in women; saliva test for PD; open science; "off period" analysis; we ponder why a researcher thinks being able to name 38 vegetables in one minute is normal; and more ...

Medications for PD fall into three categories. The first category includes drugs that increase the level of dopamine in the brain. The second category of PD drugs affects other neurotransmitters in the body in order to ease some of the symptoms of the disease. The third category of drugs prescribed for PD includes medications that help control the non-motor symptoms of the disease, that is, the symptoms that don't affect movement. The most common drugs for PD are in the first category, dopamine precursors—substances such as levodopa that cross the blood-brain barrier and are then changed into dopamine.  Other drugs ...

Weekly Update - Highlights include: Looking ahead to World Parkinson Congress 2019 and back at WPC2016; a vacuum cleaner analogy that sucks; Help Wanted (for this website); dyskinesias Dancing; Losing your grip (and where to look for it); don't take CBD Oil to Disney; pick your PD therapy - hockey or karate; research study says strength training makes you breathe hard; Kirk Gibson; Olympic dreams for PD skier; reducing dementia risk; and more ...

In a recent post, I sarcastically noted that dopamine agonists (such as mirapex/pramipexole and requip/ropinirole) are a category of drugs that have a surprising efficacy in destroying lives. A recent 5 year study found that 46% of PD patients that were prescribed a dopamine agonist developed impulse control disorders, including gambling addiction, hypersexuality and porn addiction. After reading the following case study from the January 2019 edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, I can’t help but wonder if we should build a casino to raise funds for Parkinson’s Disease research. The case study presents the story of a woman who ...

Social media users in India were abuzz the past few weeks over a video posted on Facebook by Nanavati Super Specialty Hospital (yes, that is the hospital's real name)  that showed the results of an apomorphine infusion on a 50-year old patient with advanced Parkinson's Disease. Before the treatment, the patient was barely able to lift his arms and struggled to walk. After the apomorphine injection, the patient was able to walk and run, and even do push-ups. Apomorphine is a very strong dopamine agonist. The video fails to show that the drug's effect only lasts for an hour or two, ...

This is a recap of the most interesting news and discussions relating to Parkinson’s Disease this past week. Researchers delivered a sobering statistic that if you can survive more than 10 years with Parkinson's, there is a greater than 50% chance of developing dementia...and reminded us that regular exercise is the best intervention to avoid becoming a statistic. Fee-fi-fo-fum, this woman can smell the musky smell of Parkinson's...the fascinating story of a wife who nagged her husband about his hygiene for years before his PD diagnosis...20+ years later researchers are using her to sniff out biomarkers that can be used ...

For those who are either new to, or unfamiliar with Parkinson's Disease, one of the things that seems to surprise most people is that the prescription drugs have no effect one the disease itself. The drugs provide only symptomatic control. Whether you take the drugs or not, the disease progresses (gets worse), and the drugs have less ability to control the symptoms...requiring larger or more frequent doses...and/or becoming less effective. At a certain level, this seems highly suspicious. You need more and more of a drug...are we sure the drugs are not making it worse? Then, there's another issue. The ...