Thirty-one patients with Parkinson's disease were treated with the ergot alkaloid bromocriptine, a drug which stimulates dopamine receptors. Bromocriptine had a slight therapeutic effect in patients on no other treatment and an additional effect in patients on levodopa. The mean optimum dosage of bromocriptine, established over a 12 week period, was 26 mg daily. In 20 patients bromocriptine was...

Tako-tsubo syndrome is a disease with similar alterations to ose observed in acute myocardial infarctions in the absence of ronary stenosis. Several pathophysiological mechanisms have en proposed to explain the unusual features of this syndrome, ch as multivessel coronary vasospasm, abnormalities in ronary microvascular function, and catecholamine-mediated rdiotoxicity. Inflammation may also pl...

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder of unknown cause. Age is the most consistent risk factor and incidence in the general population over 75 years of age is 254:100 000. With an aging population the management of Parkinson’s disease is likely to prove an increasingly important and challenging aspect of medical practice. Classically Parkinson’s disease presents with resting tremo...

OBJECTIVE There is clearly a necessity to identify novel non-dopaminergic mechanisms as new therapeutic targets for Parkinson's disease (PD). Among these, the soluble guanylyl cyclase (sGC)-cGMP signaling cascade is emerging as a promising candidate for second messenger-based therapies for the amelioration of PD symptoms. In the present study, we examined the utility of the selective sGC inhibi...

Parkinsonism refers to a clinical syndrome characterized by a variable combination of tremor, bradykinesia or akinesia, rigidity, and postural instability. In general, two of these four features must be present to make a diagnosis of parkinsonism. However, the situation is complicated by rare cases of pure akinesia in the absence of tremor and rigidity that have the classic pathology of Parkins...

Detailed characteristics of voluntary saccadic eye movement were measured in 14 Parkinsonian patients and 12 age-matched controls by d-c electrooculography (5% attenuation at 450 Hz). Subjects performed rapid, alternating gaze shifts between two fixed visual targets separated horizontally by 25” of arc. On average, the patients took about twice as long as the controls (p < ,001) to complete a c...

A prospective, randomized blind study was conducted in 40 patients undergoing phacoemulsification and posterior chamber intraocular lens implantation. They received anaesthetic infiltration of 2% lidocaine with 1:200,000 epinephrine and hyaluronidase 150 U ml(-1) in a volume of 2, 3, 4 or 5 ml into the sub-Tenon's fascial space through a Greenbaum cannula after a conjunctival incision. Reductio...

BACKGROUND Metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) have been shown to be potential targets for numerous neurological diseases, including Parkinson's disease (PD). We previously reported that ACPT-1, a non-selective group III mGluRs agonist, injected locally into the globus pallidus, striatum or substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr), significantly attenuated the haloperidol-induced catalepsy ...

In eleven patients with Parkinsonism there was a strong inverse relationship between the frequency of spontaneous activity of the arms and the degree of fatiguing of repetitive finger movements made upon command. The prevalence of spontaneous arm movement was related inversely (but more weakly) to the time taken to complete a pegboard test or to move clothespegs by hand; it had little associati...

Dobutamine stress echocardiography (DSE) has been widely used as a diagnostic and prognostic modality in the management of stress. DSE is associated with limited complications and adverse effects on the health of patients. In this case report, we described a 42-year-old female patient with dobutamine-induced coronary artery spasm with history of exertional dyspnea, which had deteriorated recent...