New research from Advanced Parkinson’s has given people with the disease the hope that they can still sleep more easily.
Patients with Parkinson’s, a degenerative disease, often have difficulty walking or sleeping due to orthostatic hypotension.
This happens when a person gets to their feet and blood pressure drops, which causes dizziness and possibly dizziness.
For people with Parkinson’s disease, this is because not enough blood is flowing to the brain because the regulator in the brain is broken.
But a new French study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that spinal cord implants could help patients with Parkinson’s.
Neurosurgeon Jocelyn Bloch and neuroscientist Gregoire Cortina revealed earlier this year that spinal cord implants allowed three paralyzed people to walk again.
The latest study was conducted on a 48-year-old woman who did not have Parkinson’s disease but had similar symptoms, including orthostatic hypotension.
For paralyzed people, a spinal cord implant mimics how the brain sends electrical impulses to muscles, connecting a broken link.
But for orthostatic hypotension, it stimulates a regulator in the brain that senses the need to send more blood when people are standing upright.
The implant helped the woman, after taking a few steps, walk more than 250 meters.
“He was not cured, he did not run a marathon, but this operation clearly improved his quality of life,” said Dr. Bloch.
However, it is important to note that this is only one case and more research needs to be done, especially in Parkinson’s patients.
It is not yet certain that the form of orthostatic hypotension detected in Parkinson’s patients can be detected only by stimulation of the implant target regulator.
According to the Parkinson’s Foundation, more than three-quarters of people with the disease have sleep-related symptoms.
Tremor, stiffness, pain, and restless leg syndrome – these all contribute to the sleep problems that people with Parkinson’s disease have.
Another common factor in Parkinson’s patients is a lack of dopamine, and this is usually helped by taking apomorphine.
It replaces dopamine and relieves symptoms such as chills and stiffness.
But the drug can cause dopamine to rise and then fall, leading to muscle spasm when taken orally.
However, a device similar to an insulin pump that delivers continuous apomorphine overnight could solve the problem, according to a study published in the journal Lancet Neurology on Thursday.
A randomized study showed that those who used the pump “significantly improved” their sleep compared with those who took the placebo.
Co-author Emmanuel Flamand-Rose said that “restrictions on wearing a small pump” are much lower at night than wearing such a device all day.
However, further research is needed because the study had a small sample size – less than 50 people – and focused on people already at an advanced stage of Parkinson’s disease.
