Neurologists Kathrin LaFaver and Indu Subramanian discuss highlights from the 2023 International Congress of Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders.
Please confirm that you would like to log out of Medscape. If you log out, you will be required to enter your username and password the next time you visit.Hi. This is Kathrin LaFaver. I'm a movement specialist in Saratoga Springs, New York, and I have the pleasure of talking today with Dr Subramanian, who is the director of the PADRECC Center in LA and also a clinical professor of neurology at UCLA.
He covered a number of topics in that lecture. He talked about new targets for DBS for freezing , kind of looked over the pedunculopontine nucleus as a target, the cuneiform nucleus as a target, and why these are areas that are not easy to treat around invoking the idea of using directional leads in some of these areas but still some very unmet needs there.
Another really interesting topic with Parkinson's in the past years has been Parkinson's and gut health. Have there been any updates in that realm?, and they looked at 74 people over 12 weeks. Interestingly, they found that there was improved time to on and also improvements in that nonmotor subscale that I talked about, the MDS-NMS scale, and specifically, in the arenas of sleep fatigue and gastrointestinal issues. I think that's quite interesting.
Many patients on this formulation end up getting dyskinesia and then discontinuing it. As we know, sometimes based on body weight or body mass index or female sex, patients need less levodopa, so using that as the only formulation is really quite difficult to imagine. She did really call out the sense that is there a role for primary and secondary prevention of Parkinson's disease, specifically addressing the fact that most of what we do now is really tertiary prevention or treatment of people who are already diagnosed.