MDMA to treat Parkinson’s!

[radiometer]

Haha! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Ricaurte!!


http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas.../plos-ada07270 5.php

Amphetamine-related drugs ameliorate symptoms of Parkinson's


To model Parkinson's disease, researchers bred mice with severe
dopamine deficiencies that displayed rigidity, inhibited motion, and, as
seen here, freezing behavior. (Photo: Caron et al.)

The debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease are well known: muscle
rigidity, impaired movement, and the uncontrollable shaking that makes
even the most mundane activity a challenge. The symptoms result from a
progressive deterioration of neurons, found in the midbrain, that produce
dopamine. With no cure on the horizon, the most common treatment
involves administration of the dopamine precursor, L-DOPA, usually in
pill form. Though symptoms subside at first, this treatment is rendered
ineffective over time.

In a new study reported in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Tatyana
Sotnikova and colleagues from Duke University create a mouse model
that recapitulates many of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease and use it
to screen potential therapeutic drugs. By eliminating the dopamine
transporter - the protein responsible for recycling the chemical into
neurons - in mice, the authors reduced dopamine levels in the midbrain
by 20-fold. In addition, chemically inhibiting dopamine production in
these mice resulted in essentially unmeasurable levels of the
neurotransmitter, since it could now neither be produced at normal levels
nor be recycled.

The authors tested a number of drugs at various doses and found that in
addition to L-DOPA-related treatments, drugs related to amphetamine
were effective in ameliorating muscle rigidity, tremor, and impaired
movement in these mice. Most effective was
methylenedioxymethamphetamine HCl (MDMA), commonly known as
ecstasy. It has been shown that amphetamines can trigger release of
neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine and
cause sudden bursts in neurotransmission, leading to a feeling of
alertness, increased muscular activity, and reduced fatigue. This study,
however, shows that treating mice with MDMA does not increase
dopamine levels; furthermore, treating the mice with drugs related to
serotonin or norepinephrine did not ameliorate the disease's symptoms.
These results suggest that MDMA likely acts through a pathway unrelated
to these common neurotransmitters.

Future work will be required to understand how MDMA was able to
ameliorate the symptoms of Parkinson's in these mice and to assess the
toxicity of MDMA and related compounds in greater detail in the future.
However, this study opens the door to a search for compounds related to
ecstasy, which may provide a more effective treatment in the later stages
of the disease - and hopefully allow patients to perform the simple
functions of everyday life independently again.

###
Citation: Sotnikova TD, Beaulieu JM, Barak LS, Wetsel WC, Caron MG, et
al. (2005) Dopamine-independent locomotor actions of amphetamines in
a novel acute mouse model of Parkinson's disease. PLoS Biol 3(8): e271.

CONTACT:
Marc G. G. Caron
Duke University Medical Center
Rm 487 CARL Bldg, Research Dr.
Durham, NC USA 27710
+1-919-684-5433
+1-919-681-8641 (fax)
caron002@mc.duke.edu

PLEASE MENTION PLoS Biology (www.plosbiology.org) AS THE SOURCE
FOR THESE ARTICLES. THANK YOU.

All works published in PLoS Biology are open access. Everything is
immediately available without cost to anyone, anywhere--to read,
download, redistribute, include in databases, and otherwise use--subject
only to the condition that the original authorship and source are properly
attributed. Copyright is retained by the authors. The Public Library of
Science uses the Creative Commons Attribution License.

[Nagognog2]

A friend of mine used to suffer from a bad case of arthritis in one of his knees. He found that after taking alpha-Ethyltryptamine. acetate that the pain was gone. This was back before a-ET was banned as a schedule I drug here in the USA. He consulted with his rheumatologist on this, who was very interested. My friend kept taking the a-ET on a weekly basis. In a few months, his chronic case of arthritis was gone for good.


So, unfortunately, is legal access to a-ET.

[FrankenChrist]

I saw this thing on TV (years ago, so don't bother asking for details) where this English guy who developed Parkinson's at a young age took XTC and suddenly he was able to do gymnastic and acrobatic moves again.