Quote:
Originally Posted by krugen68
""Something is very off with this article. It wants to say that any sort of dopaminergic treatment (even agonists) is harmful. Well what alternative do we have? They do not offer one that i can see. Maybe we will one day have GABA and adenosine receptor agonists as our gold cadillac treatment but for now we're stuck and frankly I'd rather be able to move than to worry about whether or not I can begin to generate my own dopamine 10 or 20 years from now. ""
I totally accept your point about wishing to move now, HOWEVER unless we encourage challenging research activity outside the dopamine / DA mindset, Pharma and reactionary parts of the medical community will be happy to feed coming generations the same hackneyed palliatives for the next 40 years.
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Krugen,
I agree with you, but my understanding is that much of what holds us back from progress in this area is the notion that we have sinemet, so what's the rush? There are several alternatives in trial that I started to mention because I was thinking "dopa hang up" when I first read that report. I could seriously see the GABA treatment by Neurologix and Adnosine receptor antagonists taking the place of what we have now. In the article, guess I really could not understand if dopamine therapy was being discouraged or encouraged but manipulated somehow. Speaking of Adnosine antagonists, the research has been around a while, enough to constitute a book!!
Adenosine Receptors and Parkinson's Disease
The question I have is why do these treatments slog through trials or never get approved? There is a thread started here that asks a similar question:
Why don't we have parallel tracking for other conditions?
Initially designed to help AIDS patients, parallel tracking makes drugs showing promising results in phase III of the IND process available to patients whose condition prevents them from participating in controlled clinical trials. Parallel tracking is similar to the treatment IND, a program started several years earlier.
A large part of the problem IMHO is that we have no unified voice questioning the status quo, so why do anything differently? It can take on average, fourteen years for a new treatment to make it through the pipeline, we don't have that kind of time to waste. We need to start demanding more of the scientific community and advocate for alternatives to dopa replacement.
Laura