Another scourge to strike Parkinson’s sufferers:insomnia. Difficulty sleeping is common during the disease. The causes are many. The patient is sometimes simply anxious because of the disease or he can be awakened by uncontrolled movements. Finally, his sleep can be directly affected by the lack of dopamine, the hormone whose progressive disappearance explains Parkinson’s disease.
Treatments for insomnia, including melatonin, cannot therefore be the same for all Parkinson’s patients. But a study published in the Lancet Neurology offers a promising avenue: using a pump for administering medication, l’apomorphine.
This is the same system used by some diabetics to inject insulin continuously. But the study, led by neurologist Emmanuel Flamand-Roze and led by his colleague Valérie Cochen de Cock, looked at the fact of only use the pump at night.
“Thus, the constraint linked to wearing a small pump does not exist during the day”he explained.
The results are rather encouraging. Compared to patients who received a placebo, patients benefiting from this device reported a more marked improvement in their sleep.
However, the study was only carried out on a small sample (about forty participants), which requires conducting wider works to confirm the effectiveness of the device. Moreover, it focused on patients at an already advanced stage.
“It’s more like people who have been evolving for ten years”specifies Mr. Flamand-Roze, who had already obtained initial encouraging results as to the interest of this pump in other aspects of the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.