Ann, we tried this, it was a total disaster for us and one my husband has not fully recovered from, if he ever will. Not to scare you, though, you know we are all so different.

He has predominant ridigity and pain PD although he does have a tremor the mirapex helps with. We've been dx'd a little over four years, if that helps. We tried to get off mirapex for the same reasons you are getting off requip: sleepiness, brain fog, weight gain. Our neuro, a key guy at a teaching facility, told us to just switch: one day just quit taking the mirapex and begin with requip, titrating up slowly on how many mg of requip we got up to....problem was, we got to 16mg a day of requip and still felt like total crap. We had been taking about 2.5 mirapex a day.

We gave it three weeks. It was quite bad, so we had to go back to mirapex. Didn't want to, but the pain was simply intolerable, and my husband has a pretty high pain threshold. We were taking a ton of aspirin and ibuprofen, hoping to get past the "turning point" but never got there.

When we went to our regular neuro after this experiement (the specialist who got us to switch we only see a few times a year, not sure now it's worth it!) and told him we'd been switched from mirapex to requip, he just shook his head and said "that never works, you have to take so much more requip to get the same effect as you do with mirapex." And one can only take so much of any one drug.

Before we tried the switch I did a lot of research. Everyone had a different opinion, it was really no help and actually made the decision harder. In the end we just decided we would try it, and could always go back. You can, but you may suffer some setbacks like we did, and are still working to recovery from. And the experience was something I would not wish on anyone.

I'd google this and see what you find. Look for someone with roughly the same type of PD you have, length of time you've had it, etc. That might make your decision, and any experiment, less of a gamble. Good luck.