[wtf] Parkinson's drugs stimulate urge to bet


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Parkinson's drugs stimulate urge to bet

PATIENTS treated with drugs for Parkinson?s disease can turn into compulsive gamblers, a study suggests.

Doctors in America treated 11 patients who had a change of personality when prescribed drugs that mimic the behaviour of the mood chemical dopamine.

One of them was a clergyman who said that he had become obsessed with gambling, and a woman patient lost $100,000 (?57,600) and broke up her marriage as a result of the same obsession. She could not drive past a casino without going in. Other patients lost as much as $200,000 in six months. When the drugs were withdrawn the gambling habit disappeared.

Six patients also developed other behavioural problems, including compulsive eating, increased alcohol consumption and an insatiable appetite for sex.

Parkinson?s patients have reduced levels of dopamine, which relays messages between brain cells. It is this that causes the symptoms of muscle rigidity and tremor. But dopamine is also known to play a role in helping the brain to recognise and seek sources of pleasure ? the basis of addiction.

The patients involved had, at most, only occasionally gambled for fun in the past. But clinic visits revealed that their personalities went through a dramatic change after starting to take the drugs. In seven cases pathological gambling developed within three months of increasing the medication dose or reaching its ?maintenance? level. The four other patients became compulsive gamblers after 12 to 30 months.

The doctors involved identified one drug, pramipexole, as the most likely to trigger compulsive gambling. But the sideeffect was not common. A retrospective study found that it occurred in about 1.5 per cent of Parkinson?s patients treated with the drug. The cases were reported online in Archives of Neurology.

The researchers emphasised that the effect was not common enough to prevent the drugs from being prescribed.

Dr Eric Ahlskog, of the Mayo Clinic, who treated most of the patients, said: ?Pathological gambling induced by a drug is really quite unusual.?

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As someone who's done a reasonable amount of research into the neurochemistry behind ADD and ADHD, it looks to me like they're effectively inducing a lot of the traits of ADHD (most likely, imo, not ADD, they work differently (both based around dopamine to a level))

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