Word: parkinsons
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...Parkinson's is caused by a breakdown of the brain's production of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which relays the electrical impulses involved in muscular movement. The last great breakthrough in treatment was in the late 1960s, when the "miracle" drug levadopa, or L-dopa-the chemical precursor of dopamine-was discovered to "unfreeze" patients who for decades had been practically rigid, unable even to produce facial expressions. Though it remains the standard treatment for Parkinson's, there is a serious downside to L-dopa. After a couple of years, during which patients seem to be cured, they start developing...
...healthy person, natural dopamine is released in tune with the body's needs, but using L-dopa is the equivalent of running a car's turbocharger in traffic. The result for Parkinson's patients is that their condition oscillates between hyperactivity while they are on L-dopa and immobility when they are not. Pharmacologists have been searching for 30 years for a drug to combine effectively with L-dopa and mute the turbocharger effect, but none has emerged...
...Ecstasy is an amphetamine-like drug that affects emotions by boosting levels of another neurotransmitter, serotonin, which is normally connected with feeling happy. Serotonin has rarely been associated with muscular movement. Confusingly for the researchers, scans of Lawrence's brain show that ecstasy has a beneficial effect on his Parkinson's even when he takes it on its own, without L-dopa...
...Researchers around the world, including Crossman and Brotchie, have suspected that serotonin may have some connection with Parkinson's and have been searching for a serotonin-stimulating drug to combine with L-dopa. They have had little success, though, and the news that the missing link may be ecstasy, or at least something in it, has cheered the Manchester duo. "The reason we're excited by Tim's case is that we've spent between us the best part of 50 years trying to understand movement disorders, and the effect we see in him with mdma [ecstasy's scientific name...
...Brotchie's enthusiasm is shared by Dr. Thomas N. Chase, a neurologist who heads the experimental therapeutics branch of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. "We don't work with street drugs, but we are not averse to taking clues from all sources," Chase says. "Parkinson's is a condition for which there is no adequate therapy, so if this observation with ecstasy is reliable, it could lead to a line of research which could benefit many, many people with this disease. And my guess is that this observation will...