Guidelines for Early Parkinson’s Disease

Guideline for the treatment of early Parkinson’s disease has been issued by The American Academy of Neurology (AAN), published in the online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the AAN. The guideline is also endorsed by the Parkinson’s Foundation. Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that primarily affects movement due to the loss of nerve cells – neurons that produce a chemical messenger (neurotransmitter) in the brain called dopamine (black substance).

Levodopa is the standard treatment of care in Parkinson’s. The new guiding principles provide recommendations for treating movement symptoms, called motor symptoms, in people with early Parkinson’s disease.

Moreover, it is an updated recommendation on dopaminergic medications (published in the 2002 AAN guideline on the initiation of treatment for Parkinson’s disease).

“We carefully reviewed the available research on the effectiveness and possible risks of medications to treat motor symptoms in people with early Parkinson’s disease and found that levodopa is usually the best first treatment for these symptoms. Still, there are side effects with levodopa as well as other drugs, so it is important that a person newly diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease discusses all options with their neurologist before deciding on the best treatment plan for them,” says guideline lead author Tamara Pringsheim, MD, MSc, of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology.

According to the guideline recommendations, treatment with levodopa provides superior benefit at reducing motor symptoms when compared to treatment with either dopamine agonists or MAO-B inhibitors.

These guidelines may thus help alleviate motor symptoms in PD through appropriate medications.

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Source-Medindia