Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0233565 (bradykinesia)
 2,352 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The authors present the preliminary results of 20 patients selected to be operated on between January 1996 and April 1997. These patients presented one of the present indications for stereotactic posteroventral pallidotomy (PVP), such as: rigidity, akinesia/bradykinesia, gait dysfunction, drug induced dyskinesias and tremor. Every patient of this protocol was evaluated by: UPDRS score, Schwab and England scale, Hoehn and Yahr Staging Scale before and after surgery. The results in 3 months showed a remarkable improvement after PVP (P < 0.01) in all functional assessments, except for facial expression, speech and posture. The morbidity was 5%. 5 patients (25%) who were in Hoehn and Yahr 5 underwent a bilateral simultaneous PVP. In 5 patients (25%), who had tremor, during the PVP, VIM thalamotomy was added. These preliminary results, suggest that PVP is highly effective for PD symptoms.
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PMID:Preliminary results in surgery of Parkinson's disease. 985 Jul 46

With the exception of thalamotomy for drug-refractory tremor, surgical therapy for Parkinson's disease has been almost abandoned as treatment for Parkinsonian symptoms between 1965 and 1985. Reasons for this development relate to inconsistent postoperative results, complications associated with stereotactic surgical techniques and, most importantly, the advent of levodopa, which is still considered to be the gold standard in pharmacotherapy for Parkinson's disease. However, both, the long-term experience with L-DOPA therapy on the one hand and the progress of advanced stereotactic techniques and fetal graft research on the other hand have lead to reconsideration of surgical therapy in Parkinson's disease for patients, who can not be treated satisfactorily with medication. Both lesions (via thermocoagulation) and/or neurostimulation (via chronic intracerebral implantation of electrodes) in thalamic nuclei (nucleus ventralis oralis posterior/intermedialis thalami; VOP/VIM) may alleviate rest tremor in PD patients. In principle neurostimulation has the significant advantage of reversibility with regard to side effects in comparison to lesion surgery. Furthermore ventro-posterior pallidotomy or chronic stimulation in this structures may ameliorate bradykinesia and levodopa-induced dyskinesias. Additionally, "switching-off" the subthalamic nucleus by neurostimulation has been reported to reduce rigidity, bradykinesia and levodopa-induced ON-OFF-fluctuations. On the other hand, neuronal transplantation of fetal nigral dopamine precursor cells aims at restoring the striatal dopamine deficit. Both animal and clinical experiments have shown that fetal grafts survive intrastriatal transplantation and may ensue moderate to satisfactory improvements, especially in regard to bradykinesia and ON-OFF-fluctuations. Further progress in the field of neuronal transplantation will largely depend on the development of alternative cell resources.
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PMID:Neurosurgical interventions in the treatment of idiopathic Parkinson disease: neurostimulation and neural implantation. 993 Sep 59

There are a number of tremors that may affect patients with Parkinson's disease, but the classic is tremor-at-rest. The tremor is also seen during postural action after a short pause, and is often called re-emergent tremor although it appears that the physiology is the same. As a manifestation of Parkinson's disease, it is separate from bradykinesia and rigidity as the magnitude of tremor is not related to dopamine deficiency nor does it respond readily to dopamine treatment. Cellular activity in the different basal ganglia nuclei can be coherent with tremor, but cellular activity in the VIM nucleus of the thalamus, a cerebellar relay nucleus, is more coherent than cellular activity in basal ganglia. It is also notable that different body parts may have similar tremor frequencies, but are generally not exactly the same and are not phase locked. This suggests that each body part has a separate tremor generator. The ability to stay separate may be due to the somatotopic segregation of basal ganglia loops. Analysis of cellular behavior in the thalamus shows that the thalamus is not the generator of tremor. New data suggest that the basal ganglia trigger a cerebellar circuit to produce the tremor.
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PMID:Parkinson's disease tremor: pathophysiology. 2216 64