Recent advances in treating Parkinson's disease

F1000Res. 2017 Mar 13:6:260. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.10100.1. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

This article summarizes (1) the recent achievements to further improve symptomatic therapy of motor Parkinson's disease (PD) symptoms, (2) the still-few attempts to systematically search for symptomatic therapy of non-motor symptoms in PD, and (3) the advances in the development and clinical testing of compounds which promise to offer disease modification in already-manifest PD. However, prevention (that is, slowing or stopping PD in a prodromal stage) is still a dream and one reason for this is that we have no consensus on primary endpoints for clinical trials which reflect the progression in prodromal stages of PD, such as in rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (RBD) -a methodological challenge to be met in the future.

Keywords: Parkinson's disease; disease modifying treatment; motor symptoms; non-motor symptoms; prodromal stage.

Publication types

  • Review

Grants and funding

WH Oertel is Hertie Senior Research Professor supported by the Charitable Hertie Foundation, Frankfurt/Main, Germany.