Originally Posted by pegleg

I totally agree with you (and love the way you put it, aj). I have felt very "slighted" by the pharmaceutical companies of late. PD has turned out to be a bit moroe complicated than "just a motor deficientcy disorder." That and the low numbers of 1 to 1.5 million in the US has caused interest to dwindle (which we have no idea is accurate or not). We have discovered that the mainstay therapy (dopamine replacement) may not be the treatment of choice today, but for now it's all we've got.

Well, WAKE UP, Big Pharma! You can have a blockbuster treatment if you get your act together. We KNOW we have 80 million babyboomers turning 60. If even half of that number is diagnosed with Parkinson's, think of the need for management of this disease.

We're so scattered now in PD research, which is some ways is good, as it provides more options, but in other ways it has caused the interest to wane. We need biomarkers. We need less reliance on L-dopa, whose side effects can be as debilitating as the disease itself. We need more than another agonist or MAO-Inhibitor or whatever. And we shouldn't have to do invasive surgery to correct this dopamine deficiency. We're talking about cutting and drilling on the organ that is the control center of our entire body!

I'm open to discussing what we should DEMAND to happen in research. Where do we start if doctors feel a 40-year-old treatment is the best they can do.
GRRRRR!
Peg