Medicine ´pump´ may cure Parkinson´s patients

Medicine ´pump
Medicine ´pump´ may cure Parkinson´s patients

PARIS: People suffering from advanced Parkinson´s disease could benefit long-term from continuous delivery of medication through a device similar to an insulin pump, a recent French study found. Published in Nature Partner Journals with the Parkinson´s Foundation, the real-world observational study followed 110 patients being treated at the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris.

The second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer´s, Parkinson´s is sometimes treated with the medication apomorphine to lessen symptoms such as shaking, stiffness or slowness of movement. It helps replace the dopamine typically lacking in Parkinson´s patients, but taken orally it can cause dopamine to spike and then drop, leading to dyskinesia or muscle spasms. “For those patients, continuous delivery is a good option,” study co-author and neurologist Emmanuel Flamand-Roze told media.

A randomised, placebo-controlled study of Parkinson´s patients in 23 European hospitals already found in 2018 that medication administered using the device reduced “off-time” — the period when symptoms worsen as medication wears off. Flamand-Roze said his real-world observational study provided an essential compliment to the randomised trial, which looked at patients over a period of 12 weeks.