The study's coordinators caution that while encouraging, the therapy needs to be tested in a larger trial with hundreds of patients before this treatment can be recommended.
Published in the Oct. 15, 2002 issue of the American Medical Association's Archives of Neurology, the study was conducted at 10 sites by the Parkinson Study Group, under the direction of principal investigator Clifford Shults, M.D., professor of neurosciences, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, and chief of the Neurology Service at the VA San Diego Healthcare System. Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the brain in which patients develop tremor, slowness of movement and stiffness of muscles. It affects approximately 1 percent of Americans over the age of 65. Although certain drugs, such as levodopa, can reduce the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, no treatment has been shown to slow the progressive deterioration in function.
The selection of coenzyme Q10 as a potential treatment for Parkinson's was based on work carried out over the past decade by Shults, Richard Haas, M.D., UCSD professor of neurosciences, and Flint Beal, M.D., professor and chair of neurology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
Shults explained that mitochondria produce the energy-containing molecules that supply energy to chemical reactions in cells and that coenzyme Q10 plays an integral role in that process. He further explained that coenzyme Q10 is also a potent antioxidant. Over the past several years, research by Shults, Haas and Beal showed that mitochondrial function is impaired in patients with Park
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Contact: Sue Pondrom
spondrom@ucsd.edu
619-543-6163
University of California - San Diego
14-Oct-2002