Gastroparesis seems to be common to PD. Yesterday I realized I hadn't eaten for 15 hours but still had food in my stomach. Rytary or Sinemet are amino acids. Stomach acids must break proteins into amino acids before they can exit the stomach and be absorbed into the blood stream.
The same condition happens to people using narcotics. I see ads often for medications designed to speed passage through the GI tract. I wonder if this is why sometimes Ryary seems to have an effect and sometimes it doesn't Could the root problem be delayed transit times?
I add benefiber to meals and tend to have a BM once daily. Obviously it's not enough to prevent gastroparesis. Anyone have advice or comments?
TIA,
kpo
Written by
kaypeeoh
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I was diagnosed with gastroparesis several years before receiving my PD diagnosis. I had surgery to permanently keep my pylorus open, which is between your stomach & small intestine. Since my stomach wasn’t emptying well, this aided in getting food to simply pass through without needing my stomach to push it through.
on average, it takes about 30-40 hour for food to completely transit the colon, but only about 4 hours (same goes for rytary) to pass through the stomach and small intestine of a healthy individual.
assuming your estimate of 15 hours and longer is remotely accurate, draw your own conclusions.
as to rytary's absorption, the amount of amino acid (l-dopa) in rytary is measured in milligrams and has high bioavailability...hardly a huge amount to digest unless your intestinal tract is dysfunctional, which you imply it is (and probably has been for quite some time ).
How much you eat affects the speed through the colon . When you stop eating, your body goes into starvation mode and holds on to food in the colon longer to get all the nutrition it can out of it. That's why eating high fiber low calorie vegetables can reduce calorie intake more than eating less than the necessary food intake .
Sharon, It seems that technology used for time release medications could be used to help get medications to pass through the stomach into the intestines.
For clarification: you don't want levodopa digested in your stomach and broken down into amino acids. That destroys its usefulness. The levo- means the dopa is suspended in an oil droplet to fool your stomach into responding to it as an oil and allowing to to pass into your intestines and into the blood stream. The longer the levodopa remains in your stomach the more likely the oil droplet will be destroyed along with the dopa. That is why you don't want to take L/C while eating proteins because it will cause the L/C to stay in your stomach longer. However, milk doesn't stay in your stomach, so it's OK.
Since we don’t want the C./L to break down in the stomach, would it make sense to chew the tablet and let it absorb sublingually, thereforebypassing the stomach for the most part? I never considered this before. Would that be possible or am I barking up the wrong tree?
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