Treatment of Parkinson’s disease with Levodopa/Carbidopa
Okay welcome back this is dr. cruz with white coat medicine talks and today we’re going to talk again about parkinson’s disease you know we’ve talked about how dopamine is needed in the brain to control the movements and the emotional behaviors and with parkinson’s the dopamine nerves where the dopamine is created is is gone they died out and you get parkinson’s
Disease so we’re gonna talk a little bit about the medication that we give for parkinson’s the medication that is used is levodopa carbidopa now this combination is given together in one pill because the carbidopa helps the levodopa last longer in the body you see the levodopa has to get into your brain and to cross the blood-brain barrier and to do this you have to
Make it last longer in the body the carbidopa helps block a chemical that will break down levodopa now levodopa goes through your liver turns into dopamine and then dopamine can get into your brain and do its function to help you get better and improve your symptoms your doctor is probably going to start you on low dose and then keep on increasing as necessary now
As with anything medications can have side effects some people may not be able to tolerate taking the medication and then other people may have bad side effects now there are certain people that you’re not going to give it to people that have narrow angle glaucoma it’s probably not a good idea to give it to them people that i’ve taken monoamine oxidase inhibitors
With in the last 14 days you have to not give it to them as well you also don’t give it to people to have heart disease or lung disease or kidney disease so check with your doctor check with your neurologist before starting all these medications talk to them to make sure that you can take these medications in addition once you start taking these medications make
Sure that if you have any side effects you let your doctor know so that they can know how to adjust the medication for you we talked a little bit about the dyskinesias or the body movements of jerky movements that can occur when you take levodopa and because these are long-term side effects they may decide to discontinue certain medications that have affects the
Quality of life dramatically so over time over five years there can be a large significant number of people that can develop dyskinesias but over ten years even much more people who develop these dyskinesias if they take continuous levodopa there is currently a company called vista jen therapeutics that is working on a possible medicine that will help so that
The levodopa does not cause the dyskinesias they’ve it’s in early studies however it’s possible and if it works well then maybe in the future we’ll have that medication to help us so that people do not get dyskinesias as well there’s a lot of studies that are always going on and we want to talk about a lot of those other studies that are hopefully coming in the
Future because i think it’s very important for you guys to know what’s coming down the pipeline so that you guys can be hopeful and look into it and make sure that you keep abreast of all that’s going on as we know the michael j fox foundation helps to try to find a cure for parkinson’s disease and they help with funding a lot of different companies that are going
To produce results so there’s always hope for parkinson’s and hopefully we will find some sort of treatment that will work significantly much better than what we have now for white coat medicine talks this is dr. david cruz thank you very much for listening and we will see you next time
Transcribed from video
Parkinson’s treatment By Whitecoat Medicine Talks