Originally Posted by soccertese

IT'S obviously trial and error and a moving target.
think about it. a non-pd'er can eat a 2lb steak, with likely ounces of dopamine precursors in it yet that person doesn't have any central nervous system problems.
conversely, a healthy person can fast for 30 days, not eat any protein, and doesn't develop pd symptoms, either your brain is recycling dopamine or it is breaking down muscle to get precursors. then think about how you can get a similar benefit from 12mg of requip as you can from 600mg of carbidopa/levodopa, which tells me very little ingested l-dopa actually gets to the brain, have to wonder how much of that 12mg of requip gets into the brain?
i guess my point is a healthy brain tightly regulates the amount of dopamine floating around in your brain, only makes as much as it needs. with pd dopamine synthesis is reduced as brain cells die or become damaged, maybe surviving cells make more, maybe other types of neurons make dopamine. it appears the dopamine breakdown in the brain still works since we have to take it so often.. my point is even if they had the info you asked about, not sure things would be much different. you can't selectively distribute an oral drug to just specific parts of the brain. but you can selectively insert stem cells or genes which is when imho that info becomes really important.


the holy grail is a long lasting l-dopa pill that will provide a constant blood level of l-dopa, still have to becareful about when you eat protein. impax labs is awaiting approval of their improved extended release pill, there's the neupro patch and 1 a day requip. and the duodopa pump, a cheaper l-dopa pump using an insulin type pocket pump is under development, there's subdermal plastic rods under development that have a months worth of agonist. my insurance doesn't cover any of these newer products. and DBS which just works, who cares why?