I recently started taking 3 and then 6 mg of melatonin before bed and it seems to help a great deal. 18 years ago if I took more than about 0.25 mg it would make me really groggy most of the next day. 6 mg these days only seems to make me sleep better and feel a lot better then next day. I do not sleep any longer but apparently I am sleeping a lot deeper. Maybe a time-release form could help me sleep longer. I also started wearing ear plugs to help sleep. Has anyone else had experience with melatonin at these doses? I'm going to try 9 mg tonight.
It doesn't just improve sleep, but has a lot of neuroprotective effects. They say it may be that P does not reduce ability to produce melatonin, but PD decreases the number of melatonin receptors.
Here's another article on melatonin, but also has a short but good list of chemicals that work in animal models of PD, aimed at better mitochondrial function, but also most of them have other effects like iron-chelating, antioxidant, and preventing protein misfolding. I don't use the Resveratrol or Curcumin in the list because humans do not seem to allow them to get in the blood or brain nearly as well as animals.
Before this article I purchased sleep medicine, that just happens to be melatonin.
I go to sleep quickly. I wanted sleep medicine for a personal experiment. As I do not tremor while asleep, not that I notice while asleep, I wanted to see if making myself sleepy during the day would effect my day tremors. Night or day, taking 3mg melatonin, no effect. I will try a higher dose.
From the article: "melatonin’s neuroprotective qualities are believed to actually slow the progression of PD"
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clarify: w/o melatonin I go to sleep quickly.
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update: 10mg, Controlled Release Melatonin. Taken the previous evening and again this morning. No discernible effect (tremor). Maybe it would have the desired effect on someone. We are all different. Saying that, what makes us each different is our food choices. I still think that needs looking into.
Timed-release melatonin is a supplement that is formulated to be released in amounts that mimic healthy, natural melatonin levels. It is metabolized so that levels rise sharply after the supplement is taken and then remain at a high plateau for several hours. Levels then drop sharply to allow for waking. This mimics the healthy, normal circadian rhythm cycles that are linked to restful sleep.
Research in chronobiology has shown that maintaining melatonin cycles is important not just to restful sleep but also to overall health. For this reason, an increasing number of health experts are recommending timed-release melatonin as the ideal melatonin supplement. It more closely correlates to the natural levels of melatonin in a healthy brain. Maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm is important to health, so timed-release melatonin supplements are usually the best option.
I take 1.5 or 3 mgr every night between 9 and 10pm, read for about 1 hour and sleep deep until 6am waking up once for bathroom and promptly fall back asleep. If I don't take the melatonin I wake up around 1 am and can't fall back to sleep for 2 to 4 hours and then have a tired day
My husband needs 9mg ER melatonin to sleep well. He still wakes up to eat but will go back. Our grandchild is severely disabled from brain damage resulting from meningitis at age 2. I used to go to workshops attended by caretakers and foster parents of neuro kids and believe me, they use really high doses to help these kids sleep because they were all on neuro drugs which kept them up at night. They needed something to offset that in order to sleep.
Melatonin can interfere with the meds so if you see things get worse early in the day it would probably be the lingering melatonin and you might need to cut back some.
There's a BLT (bright light therapy ) study done based on suppression of melatonin to improve PD symptoms. Google "A historical justifi cation for and retrospective analysis of the systematic application of light therapy in Parkinson ’ s disease" by Gregory L Willis
My own personal experience with Seratonin and Melatonin is my PD symptoms were much worse in the morning after taking one or the other.
That's a great idea for someone to be looking into light therapy because light therapy can encourage the proper melatonin cycles and it is known to decrease depression from winter blues. Maybe insufficient melatonin or improper cycles is a cause of the winter blues. So it begs the question, to what extent could PD depression have a "winter blues" component year-round. Also, people with outdoor jobs get about 4x less PD. Simple halogen lights (those large outdoor flood lights, also used in car lights) have the spectrum that is most like the sun. I've used 2000 Watts of them to make a "Sun bed". It's like laying on the beach in the middle of winter, complete with sunglasses. But if the eyes are the only thing triggering the melatonin cycles, then a 50 watt flood light pointing at a sheet of aluminum foil behind your computer screen might be good. Looking at halogen bulbs directly at close range can cause eye damage.
Taking 3 mg melatonin during the day seems to be helping too, without making me sleepy. Makes me more relaxed. I just did a pubmed search and found this connection between melatonin and stress/depression: "The emergence of mood changes and sensory symptoms associated with the "on-off" may be facilitated by deregulation of LC-pineal melatonin functions." The "mood changes" they are referring to are increased depression and anxiety during "off" periods.
I seem to have apathy, so I'm going to try 5-HTP, DHEA, and St John's wort.
I recently was diagnosed with REM Behavioral Sleep Disorder. The disorder is that one strikes outs physically sometimes when dreaming. Of course, this doesn't work sharing a bed with my Spouse. My Neurologist proscribed 10mg Melatonin before bed, which has prevented the sticking out.
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Labs/ Bloodwork
20-100 mg/night of melatonin to stop progression of Parkinson's?
