Levodopa is the gold standard for the treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD) because of its outstanding clinical efficacy. However, the majority of patients experience various adverse reactions, including the wearing-off phenomenon, the on-off phenomenon, dyskinesia and psychiatric symptoms. The response to levodopa depends not only on the intrinsic responsiveness of the patients, but also on va...

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder of the extrapyramidal nervous system affecting mobility and control skeletal muscular system. Although PD can develop at any age, it begins most commonly in older adults, with peak age onset around 60 years. Levodopa dopamine agonists such as ropinirole are used treatment. This complete literature search was done using Google Scho...

CONTEXT Pramipexole and levodopa both ameliorate the motor symptoms of early Parkinson disease (PD), but no controlled studies have compared long-term outcomes after initiating dopaminergic therapy with pramipexole vs levodopa. OBJECTIVE To compare the development of dopaminergic motor complications after initial treatment of early PD with pramipexole vs levodopa. DESIGN Multicenter, parall...

Fourteen slightly disabled patients with Parkinsonism were treated separately with benzhexol, amantadine, and levodopa. Benzhexol and amantadine both gave a 15% reduction in functional disability and levodopa a 36% reduction. Benzhexol lessened the rigidity and improved the flexion of posture of Parkinson's disease, but had little or no effect on akinesia and tremor. Amantadine and levodopa cau...

Sixty-nine patients with Parkinson's disease were randomly allocated in a trial to compare the therapeutic effects of levodopa and amantadine. The patients were assessed clinically and scored by occupational therapy tasks and degrees of disability. Both drugs were used for 2 months; in the first 4 weeks the doses were gradually increased to 400 mg of amantadine or 4 g of levodopa respectively, ...

Levodopa is the principal agent in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Unfortunately the therapeutic benefits are optimal only in the early stages of the disease, with long-term use associated with motor complications such as levodopa-induced dyskinesia (LID). Risk factors associated with the development of LID are generally accepted to involve the degree of dopamine (DA) denervation in ...

Dopamine has been hypothesized to modulate response inhibition. To test this hypothesis, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the effects of the dopamine prodrug levodopa on the brain responses to a well-validated response inhibition task (go/no-go, or GNG). Since abnormalities of response inhibition and dopamine have been thought to underlie tics and other symptoms o...

In 1993, the last AAN Practice Parameter on medical treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD) concluded that levodopa was the most effective drug for management of this disorder. Since then, a number of new compounds including non-ergot dopamine agonists (DA) and sustained-release levodopa have been released and studied. Thus, the issue of treatment in de novo PD patients warrants reexamination. Sp...

1. The intra-arterial blood pressure responses to Valsalva’s manoeuvre and postural change were investigated as indices of cardiovascular reflex activity in seventeen Parkinsonian patients on maximally tolerated doses of L( -)-dopa (levodopa) and repeated in nine patients on levodopa with an extracerebral decarboxylase inhibitor, L-alpha methyldopahydrazine. The results were compared with contr...

Twenty-seven Parkinsonism patients and 31 controls, matched for age and verbal IQ, were tested on an objectively scored personality test (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) at the beginning of the patients' levodopa therapy and three months later. Patients, but not the controls, were retested after 15 months of levodopa treatment. The patients, all of whom were intact intellectually, ...