Amphetamines may help Parkinsons (merged)

E-llusion

E-llusion

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U.S. medical researchers say they've discovered amphetamines can reverse the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in mice with an acute form of the condition.

The researchers at the Duke University Medical Center cautioned their findings in animals do not suggest Parkinson's disease patients should find relief by taking amphetamines, which are drugs that can be abused and have many dangerous side effects.

Rather, the findings indicate drugs with similar chemical attributes might offer useful alternatives to current therapies, the researchers said.

The study also showed amphetamines -- normally thought to act by increasing dopamine concentrations in the brain -- correct the behavioral abnormalities associated with Parkinson's in mice devoid of the brain messenger.

Parkinson's disease stems from the degeneration of neurons in a brain region that controls movement. That degeneration, in turn, leads to a shortage of the chemical messenger dopamine.

The finding that amphetamines can alter movement independently of dopamine opens new directions in the search for prospective anti-Parkinson's drugs, the researchers said.

The team reports its findings in the August issue of Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

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Amphetamines may help Parkinsons
DURHAM, N.C., Aug. 1 (UPI)


Source
 
God forbid people with Parkinsons take my Desoxyn

Drugs with "similiar chemical attributes"?

What, people with Parkinson's are too good for my pharmaceutical meth? Geez.

When did neurologists become pharmaceutical elitists? They're the only reasons why barbituates are still sold to pharmacies.
 
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050801/full/050801-3.html
The drug ecstasy relieves the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in mice, a team of researchers has found.
The scientists did not look at the drug's effects in people, and do not advocate self-medication. "We don't want to give the idea that every Parkinson's patient should be standing on the street corner trying to buy amphetamines," says team leader Marc Caron, a cell biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Nevertheless, the team is hopeful that their findings may point to new treatments for Parkinson's, a debilitating disorder in which patients lose the ability to control their actions.
Caron's team looked at genetically altered mice that lack the brain chemical dopamine. As in humans with low dopamine levels, these mice exhibit Parkinson's-like symptoms, such as tremors and stiff limbs.
The team then dosed the mice with chemicals, looking for drugs that might alleviate their symptoms. What worked best, they found, was methylenedioxymehtamphetamine (MDMA), an amphetamine better known as ecstasy.
But MDMA did not raise dopamine levels, hinting that it restores movement through an unknown mechanism outside of the dopamine system.

Better together

The team also found that a combination of MDMA and the current Parkinson's drug L-DOPA, a chemical building block of dopamine was more effective than either drug alone.
"This suggests that maybe low concentrations of these amphetamines, or compounds related to them, could be potentially used as add-ons to L-DOPA," says Caron. The study is reported in PloS Biology1.
Caron aims to search for drugs that act similarly to MDMA. He does not advise giving MDMA to Parkinson's patients, but hopes to find other chemicals that mimic its effects.
The new results are ironic, given that three years ago a study suggested that ecstasy might cause Parkinson's-like symptoms in monkeys. But the researchers who published that study retracted it after they realized they had mixed up ecstacy with methamphetamine, commonly known as speed.
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The researchers at the Duke University Medical Center cautioned their findings in animals do not suggest Parkinson's disease patients should find relief by taking amphetamines, which are drugs that can be abused and have many dangerous side effects.
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First the obligatory denial statement:

These drugs are: bad, nasty, eats your goose, causes bad TV reception and is the sole source of infomercials, eats babies, makes your pet fish die, blah blah blah...

Now that I've said my "Pledge of Allegiance" to the Drug War...


It's incredible that it has taken researchers this long[/U] to determine that amphetamines may help relieve Parkinsons symptoms. 8(
 
^ Thank the War on Drugs for that.

BTW, an amphetamine is already used in the treatment of Parkinson's - selegeline (deprenyl) is N-propargyl-N-methylamphetamine, and is used in the early stages of the disease (essentially because it inhibits the enzyme - MAO-B - that is the main cause of dopamine breakdown)
 
When amphetamines are used properly they can be
very powerful tools.
 
yeah, I thought they already used amphetamines to treat parkinson's.

I thought this was old knowledge?
 
^^yeah same as.

Didn't Hitler have daily methamphetamine injections to help stop his tremors caused by Parkinsons?
 
it is old news. but the researchers make the news people think it's new, so they get more money. it's very rare when a study that is covered in the press is ever novel.

amphetamines are widely prescribed by neurologists for all sorts of problems, incluiding parkinson's.

There's actually more understood about amphetamines in humans.

Psychiatrists tend to prefer Ritalin, a non-amphetamine, because it's got "similiar properties" and is super-modern, since it came out in 1954.
 
all i know is, amphetamines aren't as fun as much as they're good at making you cracked up to be.
 
I recall a documentry from a year or two ago (on BBC I think) that was about this guy in his twenties who had Young Onset Parkinson's, and when he took MDMA his muscle rigidity and tremor completely disappeared for a few hours. This was after he'd been taking Levodopa (dopamine precursor) for quite a while, and as often happens it had stopped being effective. Obviously he didn't just sit about taking pills all day every day though, he moderated his usage.
 
Mister Mcwasted said:
^^yeah same as.

Didn't Hitler have daily methamphetamine injections to help stop his tremors caused by Parkinsons?
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No wonder hitler was such a crazy fuck. All that evil meth in his veins just drove him nuts.
 
Didn't Hitler have daily methamphetamine injections to help stop his tremors caused by Parkinsons?
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No Hitler got daily meth injections to help him 'stay awake & plan strategies'; in other words for the same reasons most meth users take it - to feel good. As it was, it's his heavy meth consumption that fucked things up for the Germans - like on D-Day he was obsessed by the idea that the landing was going to happen around Calais and wouldn't listen to his generals when they were telling him that the Normandy landings were the real thing, not a diversion (does that attitude sound familiar to anyone who knows a heavy meth user?).

Basically, meth helped the allies win the war much earlier thanks to fucking up Hitler's powers of reasoning (his philosophies were well fucked up long before he got anywhere near meth)
 
Amphetamines, I salute you for your pivotal role in helping free the world from nazi tyrrany and facist regimes.

However, we still need to talk about your rumored involvement with kamikazee pilots. And the battle of the bulge was NOT COOL
 
The one thing I love about this is that the government tried to let the public think ecstasy caused parkinsons disease. Now it's said to be the best out of all the amphetamine drugs to reverse the symptoms of it. I think this (and that it's used with PTSD and cancer patients) is the beginning of people starting to realize the importance of ecstasy.
 
Reinz said:
The one thing I love about this is that the government tried to let the public think ecstasy caused parkinsons disease. Now it's said to be the best out of all the amphetamine drugs to reverse the symptoms of it.
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Seriously ... Ricaurte, what's up now?

Next we'll find out that marijuana can actually help cancer patients or that opiates provide pain relief 8)
 
Amphetamines relieve Parkinson’s-like symptoms

Interesting article I found on New Scientist

Symptoms in mice that mimic Parkinson’s disease are reversed by treatment with amphetamines, including Ecstasy, according to a new study.

The drugs seem to work through a pathway not involving the chemical dopamine, which surprised the researchers since dopamine deficiency is the cause of Parkinson’s.

These results may lead to the discovery of “other systems that can replace or substitute for the very important action of dopamine”, says study author Marc Caron of Duke University, US.

Dopamine transmission in a region of the brain called the striatum is essential for normal movement. Parkinson’s results when dopamine-producing neurons in this region die.

The best current treatment for the condition is a chemical called L-Dopa – a natural precursor to dopamine. L-Dopa works well for patients in the early stages of the disease, but its effectiveness diminishes with time, and it can actually cause involuntary movements.

Unknown system
To screen for other types of drugs, Russian scientists Tatyana Sotnikova and Raul Gainetdinov, working with the team at Duke University, studied mice altered to possess no brain dopamine. They show classic symptoms of Parkinson’s disease including muscle rigidity, problems initiating movement, and resting body tremor.

When the researchers treated these mice with high doses of different types of amphetamines, their movement problems dramatically improved. The most effective compound was methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) – commonly known as Ecstasy.

This result was surprising, because amphetamines are thought to affect movement through the dopamine system. But since these mice have no functional dopamine system, an unknown mechanism must be at work.

The authors suggest proteins called trace amine receptors may be involved. Amphetamines interact with these receptors, but very little is known about their physiological role in the brain.

Ecstasy-Parkinson’s links
Some previous research has hinted that Ecstasy might actually cause symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, although the best-known study was retracted when the researchers discovered they had administered the wrong drug.

Prompted by British stuntman Tim Lawrence’s claim that his Parkinson’s symptoms were relieved by Ecstasy, a study in marmoset monkeys confirmed some anti-Parkinsonian effects the drug. And work by Werner Schmidt and colleagues at the University of Tübingen, Germany, has shown similar results in rats.

The Duke University researchers used a very different approach and a very different method, Schmidt notes, but they “reached the same conclusions as we did”.

“We have to be cautious not to be too suggestive, so that every Parkinson’s patient doesn’t run to the street corner,” Caron warns.

The researchers plan to base further work around the structure of amphetamines, Caron says, to find or create other compounds that might have similar anti-Parkinsonian effects.

Journal reference: Public Library of Science Biology (vol 3, p e271)



Article can be found here http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/drugs-alcohol/dn7772

Good to see that they are going to continue research into the insights of amphetamines, wont be long before a legal based MD** will be available ( We hope) =D
 
Neat article. I think stims are going to find more and more uses for various degenerative diseases.. I just wonder if they make the long-term consequences worse by effectively speeding up the "burn-out" process of the remaining needed neurons?

The researchers plan to base further work around the structure of amphetamines, Caron says, to find or create other compounds that might have similar anti-Parkinsonian effects.
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Heaven forbid actually using an existing drug to effectively treat a disorder! ;)
They wouldn't be able to patent it!
 
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