re:
> splibsplab-welcome to NT!

Thank you MD - I've been lurking reading this board for many several years now but your article got me riled up enough to actually post!

I have been trying Mucuna tablets for a couple of years, mostly with a concept of boosting 25/100 extended release Sinemet. It helped some but a couple of months ago I decided I'm getting pretty tired of putting up with symptoms and wanted to do more medication. But before going down the regular road with dyskinesia waiting along the way I decided to experiment with Mucuna some more and for me the powder form has been working well. Not at first but this time I decided to not be too conservative about taking a larger amount and then suddenly it was working better than Sinemet.

Still have a few things to work out like it doesn't work as well for me at the beginning of the day and I would think that digestive enzymes should help with larger doses but I'm still in the process of trying those.

I wouldn't be surprised if different forms work better for some depending on your particular digestion.

That's kind of curious that just carbidopa by itself + Mucuna didn't work as well for you as 1/2 sinemet + Mucuna. It would seem to make sense that those should have been similar. Maybe you needed to take a higher dose of the Mucuna?

I have become suspicious of carbidopa recently, I guess you must be too if you're using those 10/100s that nobody usually uses.

re: Some brands not as effective - seems like if it's processed too much to just concentrate levodopa and remove other stuff that may be counter productive since like the very interesting article above mentions it's the currently unknown "other stuff" that seems to be pretty important.

re: agonists - certainly they do work well for many but there are too many stories about divorces and shattered families for me. Seems like such a huge risk, I'd prefer a side effect like your head might explode over a side effect that your family might be broken up because you will do bad things.

The potential for Mucuna to have the fewest side effects seems to be the best path especially for YOPD where the path is going to be long.

It's really hard to figure out what to do with things happening in such slow motion. You can't tell if you made the best choice until after you've gone something like 5 years with it.

The other thing that I've been trying is nicotine, that's another area that's very promising and also woefully unexplored in research currently despite significant evidence that it does something to PD.