...at least for me.
There are supplements and there are supplements and one can go quite mad and poor trying to take all of them that show promise. Plus, it gets downright awful to be taking pills and pills and pills.
But some of them do a lot of good and here are the best that I have tried. I suggest that newbies adopt a simple test to see if these or any others are worth taking. Stand on one foot as long as you can by making several attempts and then write down your time. Repeat on your other foot. This simple test gives you a baseline on half-a-dozen PD parameters. After trying a new supplement or therapy, repeat the testing. While it won't tell you much about longterm benefits, it helps tremendously with benefits to daily function.
In my case the following pair TRIPLED my times in one week and there is some good research to back them up.
Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA) and Acetyl-L-Carnitine (ALC) work both together and seperately to address some core problems of PD. Inflammation, oxidation, and mitochondrial problems are very destructive processes at work in PWP.
ALA is one of the most important anti-oxidants around for two reasons. It crosses the blood brain barrier for one. And it not only neutralizes the free radicals that damage nerve tissues, it also is critical to recycling other anti-oxidants like Vit E and Vit C.
ALC has at least two things going for it. It boosts mitochondrial function for one. Secondly and even more interestingly, it increases the diameter of remaining neurons and makes them more efficient and able to partly compensate for the ones lost.
The third and final part of the team is green tea extract. it has many benefits but one stands out for PWP. One of the things that kills our neurons is an over-reaction of our brain's immune system. The defenders are a cell-type called the microglia. In PD, when microglia are "activated" they just don't know when to quit and destroy neurons around themselves. The substantia nigra has the greatest microglial density in the brain. Green tea's ingredients calm down the microglial reaction and stop the slaughter.