Okay so um this week’s interactive case study is um asked us to talk about carbidopa um and so i made a few slides about combination therapy and how it helps to treat symptoms of parkinson’s disease so carbidopa um and parkinson’s treatment are closely related they have been for some time parkinson’s is the depletion of dopamine in the brain and because of this
Depletion of dopamine the parkinson’s patients often shake have tremors in their extremities and consistent deficiencies in movement and control of voluntary and involuntary muscles carbidopa is a drug that’s used in combination with levodopa to treat these symptoms and this drug regimen can be very effective um it slows down the breakdown of um the levodopa
And it extends the active time in the body for dopamine so um things to remember levodopa is an isomer of dihydroxy phenylalanine and it’s actually the metabolic precursor to dopamine so it eventually does get turned converted to dopamine in the basal ganglia of the brain and that’s how it treats the parkinson’s and lastly i just want kind of a reminder that
This class of drugs are called dopaminergic agents and there are several different types but we’re talking about carbidopa so chemically and molecularly speaking um let’s go ahead and look at how the drug works on the molecular level so um we it was mentioned in the prop that carbidopa is a hydrazine derivative of the neurotransmitter dopamine one thing to of
Note is that it does not penetrate the blood brain barrier so it doesn’t affect the central nervous system um and like i mentioned it’s used in conjunction with other drugs um one of the derivatives is also known as 3 3 4 dihydroxy phenyl propanoic acid and that’s the s configuration where the hydrogens alpha to the carboxyl group are substituted by hydroxyl
And methyl groups and then we’ll talk about the l configuration as the presentation moves along so more molecular and chemical talk um it’s a dopa decarboxylase inhibitor and so it prevents the levodopa quickly turning to dopamine and that along with the carpet dopa is what’s been found to work well um combination therapy that was approved back in 1992 by the
Fda and um and then i’ll move myself if i can i can’t oh yes i can uh sorry so i just put a couple of images there’s the the wireframe one on the right and the ball and stick and i i’ve rotated them but i have some better images coming up okay so this is kind of um oh sorry okay there we go no okay i’m having some technical difficulties here anyway um so
This image is one of the ones like uh where you can see the levodopa bound um and what’s important is it’s a lipid-soluble drug so as i mentioned once it does pass through the blood-brain barrier then it helps with the carbidopa and it increases the dopamine and improves function that’s deteriorated and there is also some research to suggest more recently that
The carbidopa interacts with lymphocytes in our blood and um this works through the tyrosine hydroxylase and decarboxylase pathway okay so i really like this image um just because it’s so simple and um so i the figure this is noted in the works cited but you can see the dopamine synthesis and the brain activity in the neurons and it’s either used broken down or
Transformed into noradrenaline and um so anyway i just this is kind of one of the final images that i i wanted to leave you with so you could get a kind of a big picture about how dopamine synthesis works and how this parkinson drug its mechanism of action and how it facilitates that and i think that’s it
Transcribed from video
Interactive Case Study #3 Carbidopa – Google Slides By Kara Ferrell