"The risk of gambling problems in a Parkinson's patient is very small," said study author Mark Stacy, MD, who is now the medical director of the Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C. "However, it may be appropriate for doctors to inform patients of this potential risk, particularly in their patients taking relatively high dosages of a dopamine agonist, and with a documented history of depression or anxiety disorder."

The patients were taking pramipexole or pergolide anywhere from six to 64 months before the onset of gambling, and seven patients started gambling within one month of an increased dosage of the dopamine agonist. They may say they’re going to work when they’re actually going to casinos, Weiss said.Experts hope that by educating patients about potential behavioral side effects of the drugs, patients will be more willing to tell their health care providers about changes in their behavior.“Hopefully it opens up a conversation about the fact that drugs in some people can have striking and destructive effects on behavior,” said Moore.If the use of dopamine receptor agonists to treat Parkinson’s disease raises such serious concerns, where does that leave patients suffering from restless leg syndrome or hyperprolactinemia?“There may be a risk that’s associated [with the drugs] regardless of what they’re being used for, but the severity of that risk may weigh differently for different conditions,” Gagne said.“I would never use those drugs for restless leg syndrome,” said Weiss.

But eventually something strange happened: Klinestiver, who'd never been a gambler, suddenly became an obsessive slot machine player. Questions?American Academy Of Neurology. And these two drugs share a similar mechanism, further reducing the chance that this is all random error.In a healthy brain, dopamine acts as a crucial neurotransmitter: It gets released by one brain cell and fits into receptors on a neighboring cell, causing it to fire and an electrical impulse to get passed along.

But a meta-analysis published today in The analysis of adverse events reported to the Food and Drug Administration over a 10-year period linked the drugs to excessive gambling and sexual behaviors, but also to shopping sprees, stealing, and binge eating.


A class of drugs called dopamine agonists, used mainly to treat Parkinson’s disease, has long been suspected of causing strange psychological side effects, such as compulsive gambling …

"She said she needed some time to think … hopefully she decides to come back. have been observed to suddenly develop extreme gambling problems, drug addictions, sexual urges, and other habits classified as For any one patient, it's very hard to determine whether this kind of behavior is really the result of the drug or something that might have occurred anyway. In 1998, a West Virginia high school teacher named The drug worked, curing her tremors. Step 3 . Users of (the generic name for Requip) were 456 and 152 times more likely, respectively, to experience an impulse control problem. HoweverDopamine molecules are released from the end of one brain cell (top) and stimulate receptors on another (bottom), causing an impulse to be passed along. Dr Mosley said.People who had stronger choosing circuits or weaker stopping circuits were more likely to be impulsive.Researchers envisage they would be able to warn people if they were susceptible to having a bad reaction to the medication and they could look at other ways of treating the disease, such as brain stimulation. "[With] my mood swings and what-not … my wife said 'I can't take it anymore' and she walked out on Tuesday. "Do the Oscars’ new rules mean no more movies about white people?The Academy’s new standards are aimed at long-term change.Retirees are a powerful voting bloc.

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Researchers at Muhammad Ali Parkinson Research Center in Phoenix, Ariz., examined the data of 1,884 Parkinson's patients who were seen during a one-year period. "Parkinson's Medication Linked To Gambling." An analysis of 10 years of FDA data offers compelling evidence that common Parkinson's drugs, which are also used to treat restless leg syndrome, can have nasty behavioral side effects.A class of drugs called dopamine agonists, used mainly to treat Parkinson’s disease, has long been suspected of causing strange psychological side effects, such as compulsive gambling and sexual activity. “There are a lot of forms of impulse control, but this is a striking and unusual list” of behaviors.Joshua Gagne, a pharmacoepidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who evaluated the statistics in a note that ran alongside Moore’s analysis, called the number of reported incidents “eyebrow raising.”“It’s rare that we see such large measures of association,” he said.Reported side effects may be a low estimate of problem behaviors if patients are embarrassed to admit them to their doctors or never think to associate them with their medications, experts said.“I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” said Weiss. Though none found serious problems, some physicians became skeptical enough to shy away from the drugs.Emerging treatments for Parkinson's disease, such as the promising use of electrical stimulation of the brain, could make drug side effects a problem of the past. In the years since, The short-term upshot of this, the researchers say, is that these drugs — still on the market — need to be labeled more carefully, and patients need to be better monitored for adverse effects.