Parkinson's Disease Actual Problems and Management [antikvár]

Opening remarks M. Klingler Ladies and gentlemen, It is my honour and my pleasure to bid welcome to my Danish colleagues and to somé old friends who have come here to discuss Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is a very old illness and has a long history of unsuccessful therapy. Looking back at my own studies, I still remember the era of atropiné treatment, Bulga-cure and what not, though none of these approaches were successful. Still, they may have represented somé progress when compared with the therapeutic situation 250 years earlier. In a book published in 1692 and entitled Dreck-Apotheke, that is Diri Pharmacy or Faeces Pharmacy, there is a section on parkinsonism, i.e. on the tremor of the limbs. At that time dirt was thought to have therapeutic value. The recommendation for treatment was: Nimm vom Pfauenkot ein Quintlein und mache mit Aquavit ein Tranklein draus, i.e. take somé peacock's faeces and mix it with aquavit. Another suggestion was to wash the trembling limbs with one's own urine. Or even better, to take the urine of a healthy boy. Yet past and present mingle, progress is not ubiquitous. In India the old tradition of urine treatment as a panacea still has its adherents - in parkinsonism and elsewhere. As documented in an article in a Basle newspaper of 1978, the Health Minister of India, Raj Mahren, publicly expressed his regret that there is a psychological barrier against the drinking of one's own urine. One fosterer of the tradition seems to have been Morarji Desai, then President of India, who apparently drank his urine every day. In the treatment of Parkinson's disease we have, in the last two decades, fortunately gained somé ground on that ancient therapy and the more modern, yet equally ineffective, therapies. The foundation for the therapeutic breakthrough was laid much earlier, namely seventy years ago, by Guggenheim's discovery of levodopa. Guggenheim had always been interested in amines, and when an Italian researcher reported the isolation of a nitrogen-containing substance from viciafaba, he wasted no time. Owing to Mr. Hoffmann's culinary preference for beans, that very vicia faba grew in abundance on the Hoffmann-La Roche premises, waiting to be freed of its amines. In the same year Guggenheim identified the nitrogenous substance from vicia faba as the aminő acid dihydroxyphenylalanine, levodopa.