The side effect I had early on was some stomach upset (on your list) during the first week or two while I adjusted to it, since then really nothing significant, and have been taking 900mg per day since the end of June, prior to that app. 600mg per day since February last year. My neurologist is aware I'm taking it for PD, and he's fine with that.
Safety comments
"Ambroxol is an expectorant that has been available for adults and children over the counter in more than 50 countries for over 30 years...Ambroxol has an excellent safety record and has been studied in > 15,000 patients in more than 100 trials. While the normal expectorant dose in adults is in the range of 75–100 mg/day, doses of 1000 mg IV are used in pregnant women experiencing premature delivery to aid fetal lung maturation..."
"Ambroxol therapy has been safely used as a cough linctus since the 1970s. Its principal adverse effects are gastrointestinal disturbance and a small risk of anaphylaxis...We performed a single-center open-label noncontrolled clinical trial of oral ambroxol therapy (escalating dose to 1.26 g per day [420 mg 3 times per day]) in patients with PD of moderate severity...The drug was well tolerated, and no serious AEs were reported. A total of 176 AEs occurred, of which 121 were deemed unrelated, 32 unlikely to be related, 15 possibly related, 5 probably related, and 3 definitely related to treatment. The AEs deemed to be probably related to the interventional medicinal product were nausea (1 patient), vomiting (2 patients), a burning sensation after swallowing the interventional medicinal product (1 patient), and loose stool (1 patient). Definitely related AEs were acid reflux (1 patient), nausea (1 patient), and a transitory skin condition on the chest, back, and arms (1 patient)."
In my case I asked myself if the possible side effects in taking Ambroxol were worth taking the risk, if in fact it could potentially materially slow my progression (which for me I believe it has). In February of last year that answer was easy for me, and it was absolutely. The possibility of PD dementia looms very large for me, I watched my grandmother slowly waste away and die from it as a kid, and I'm going to try anything pretty safely possible to avoid that ending (upwards of 80% of PwPD can get dementia memory.ucsf.edu/dementia/pa....
By comparison, have you looked at the list of potential side effects in taking aspirin?
If I had to choose given what we know now, I'll take my chances with Ambroxol side effects over Exenatide (a discussion I've had with my neurologist). That said, if Exenatide research ultimately finds it works extremely well for PD (even better than Ambroxol), and can be fairly safely taken (not sure it is safe for me as I have Crohn's), then I will absolutely consider it if and when it becomes available to me as an option. In the future hopefully a variety of other treatment options will come out for PD that work great for it and are pretty safe (hopefully a lot better than I believe Ambroxol does for me), but in the meantime I need to work with what's available to me now to make sure I can get there in good enough shape to be able to try them. All PwPD need to navigate their own course with PD, and we know not all things may work as well for some as they do for others; in my view all we can do is do our due diligence on what may work, study the research, consult with our neuro, make some choices and try them, giving them a chance to work, which we of course can and should change as we find some things may not be working for us, but something else we just discovered might, or might work even better. My thoughts anyway.
I've never tried Ambroxol. I bought a few boxes of it. I have not been diagnosed with PD. I have REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, which is considered prodromal PD, and I had some PD symptoms (but less than I used to have). My RBD seems to be getting better also. This is my stack (but I need to include that I have been having a half a cup of pistachios every morning for at least 18 months): rbd-pd-protocols.blogspot.c...
I should also mention I only have a High School degree, I am prone to error, have poor impulse control, and it is likely that the root cause of our conditions are not all the same, hence the treatments may not apply to all either. And I have Hashimoto's, so if you have HT also, then my findings may be more likely to apply to you.
There are people in this group using Ambroxol. If you start a new post asking if anybody is using Ambroxol you will likely get some responses. Good luck.
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