Since we are about to look at Neruodegenerative disorders..

So, since we are going to be soon jumping into the realm of neuro-degenerative disorders and all they entail, I though it would be interesting to take a look at what some of the medications that treat different neuro disorders can do. A commonly recognized neuro-degenerative disorder is Parkinson's disease, classified by tremor, body bradykinesia, and rigidity, among other things. There are medications that can help to greatly reduce these effects, but they come with side effects. One common side effect when treating PD patients with Levodopa, a common PD drug,  is dyskinesia, which is basically just uncontrolled body movements (it is not the same as a tremor, it is more like body swaying), which the patients sometimes do not even realize they have. This article (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200005183422004#t=articleBackground ) involves a 5 year study on patients who are taking two PD medications, Ropinerole and Levodopa, to study the effects that they have on dyskinesiain patients win the early stages of PD. Patients were considered to have dyskinesia if they had a rating of 1-4 (on a scale of 0-4) on the Unified Parkinson's Disease rating scale, a cope of which can be found at this link: http://www.mdvu.org/library/ratingscales/pd/updrs.pdf (dyskinesia included on # 32-34). Patients were randomly assigned to Ropinerole of levodopa. As seen in the paper, fewer people taking ropinerole had dyskinesia.

It is obvious that the level of dyskinesia present with each medication is proportional to the does of medication taken by each patient. It has been seen that while certain doses can lower the dyskinesia, some patients that require larger doses in order to quell their other symptoms actually have more noticeable dyskinesia. It would have been nice to see the dosage number (the strength, and number of pills taken) a day for the majority of the patients that had little to no dyskinesia and compare those to the patients that did have dyskinesia.

Overall, this is an interesting read. I recommend it for anyone that is interested in movement disorders or neurological disease.

Ethan Burns