Latest emerging treatments of Parkinson's Disease - Dr. Guruprasad Hosurkar

Parkinson’s disease can be effective treated with medical treatment, the whole gamete of medications available such as dopa agonists, anticholinergics, levodopa. It can be effectively controlled, bit every the time these drugs do cause side effects and the disease also progression in the background. There can be motor fluctuations and there can also be drug induced hallucinations, drug induced motor fluctuations. So then you need alternative treatment to mitigate this type of complicated course in Parkinson’s disease. So one of the reason why the patients with Parkinson’s disease develops this motor fluctuations is that there’re is a pulsatile stimulation of the dopa receptors in the brain so what was changed is the route of administration. So what was done was duodopa, that is direct installation of dopamine , that is levodopa into the duodenum using the PEG tube. So that is one of the latest developments in Parkinson’s disease, that is available in European countries. The other development is apomorphine subcutaneous pump. Apomorphine is available as injectable and can be injected subcutaneously and decrease the features of rigidity and Parkinsonism and so that is continuously injected using a pump subcutaneously to bypass the gut delivery of these medications and this subcutaneous apomorphine pump is used in advanced Parkinson’s disease as a rescue therapy sometimes or to have an alternative to the treatment in advanced Parkinson’s disease. Dermal rotigotine is also one of the latest developments which is available in Europe and US, which again has a good role in reducing the side effects related to the commonly used dopa drugs. We have newer drugs in the pipeline like safinamide which can be used in advanced Parkinson’s disease to reduce the levodopa induced side effects or motor fluctuations, there are other newer drugs which are being looked at to reduce the complicated course of the Parkinson’s disease an to improve the quality of life, but the most important thing among this is the deep brain stimulation surgery which is available for the last 25 to 30 years and has transformed the way of especially advanced Parkinson’s disease. So these are the latest development in Parkinson’s disease treatments.