Medical Miracles with Ambien - Hamilton's Pharmacopeia (not related to PD)

youtube.com/watch?v=KTFicgr...(Not working as expected?)

This post is not related to PD but might be interesting to some here.

[SilentEchoes]

Very interesting. The working theory is that the drug works on abnormal GABA receptors. Maybe this is more relatable than we realize.

Personally, I have a hard time with time and planning. It was an early symptom, couldn't put a meal together with foods that require different temperatures and length of cooking - like a thanksgiving dinner. I miscalculate how long it will take me to get places. I showed up to a doctor appointment an hour early. I'm habitually late.

I have trouble understanding what people are saying and at first attributed it to hearing loss. I learned that it is a central processing disorder. I can't be the only one with this problem.

I'm concerned about developing the semantic form of FTD.

This video helped me connect the dots for more research. Thanks for sharing.

SE

[Bolt_Upright in reply to SilentEchoes]

You are in my nightly prayers SE (you have been for a while). We will (all) keep looking for solutions.

More on the semantic form of FTD:

theaftd.org/what-is-ftd/pri...

[SilentEchoes in reply to Bolt_Upright]

Pathology of Semantic Variant: Accumulation of TDP-43 is most commonly found at autopsy in svPPA; the remainder exhibit tau pathology.

Very rarely, some individuals diagnosed with svPPA during life are revealed to have Alzheimer’s disease pathology at autopsy.

[Bolt_Upright in reply to SilentEchoes]

My mother had AD and losing words was one of her early symptoms.

[SilentEchoes in reply to Bolt_Upright]

A lot of overlap. FTD/variants occur in younger ppl (40-60), maybe it's a form of Alzheimer's?

On a brighter note - lithium reduces the risk of dementia 🙂

[Bolt_Upright in reply to SilentEchoes]

And I am taking 10 mg of LO! The low dose in the trial is 15 mg. I need to dig into that. It takes so much time to do this scientist stuff.

[SilentEchoes in reply to Bolt_Upright]

Lol, not for the faint of heart!

[Bolt_Upright]

It's like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon: Everything relates to Parkinson's:

Sleep Aid Tied to Parkinson's Risk

— But meta-analysis includes only two Taiwanese claims studies

medpagetoday.com/meetingcov...

"VANCOUVER -- A common insomnia drug may raise the risk of developing Parkinson's disease, according to a meta-analysis presented here.

Although only two studies were of high enough quality to be included in the review, pooled data showed a 2.5-fold increased risk of Parkinson's disease among patients taking zolpidem (Ambien), Salman Hussain, PhD, of Hamdard University in New Delhi in India, reported at the Movement Disorders Society meeting here.

The hitch was that both of these retrospective, observational studies relied on a health claims database from Taiwan, and thus can't be generalized to other populations, Hussain cautioned.

"We found that there's an increased risk of getting Parkinson's disease among zolpidem users, but to confirm the association and make it robust, more study is needed, Hussain told MedPage Today.

It's not clear as to why zolpidem may raise the risk of developing Parkinson's, he said. It's highly selective for GABAA receptors, and two decades ago it was actually being investigated as a treatment for Parkinson's disease. But the two studies in the meta-analysis -- one by Yang et al published in 2014, and the other by Huang et al in 2015 -- found the sleep aid was associated with a higher risk of Parkinson's."

Bolt: This type of research does not mean much to me. PD patients have depression. Depressed people can't sleep. People who can't sleep take Ambien.

[Bolt_Upright in reply to Bolt_Upright]

On the other hand, they started a trial using low dose Ambien for PD in 2018: Use of Low-dose Zolpidem in Parkinson's Disease clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show...

[Bolt_Upright in reply to Bolt_Upright]

Lots of big words. Basically saying Ambien may be disease modifying for PD:

Emulated Clinical Trials from Longitudinal Real-World Data Efficiently Identify Candidates for Neurological Disease Modification: Examples from Parkinson’s Disease 2021 frontiersin.org/articles/10...

"Here, we demonstrate the usefulness of real-world data in identifying drug repurposing candidates for disease-modifying effects, specifically candidate marketed drugs that exhibit beneficial effects on Parkinson’s disease (PD) progression. We performed an observational study in cohorts of ascertained PD patients extracted from two large medical databases, Explorys SuperMart (N = 88,867) and IBM MarketScan Research Databases (N = 106,395); and applied two conceptually different, well-established causal inference methods to estimate the effect of hundreds of drugs on delaying dementia onset as a proxy for slowing PD progression. Using this approach, we identified two drugs that manifested significant beneficial effects on PD progression in both datasets: rasagiline, narrowly indicated for PD motor symptoms; and zolpidem, a psycholeptic. Each confers its effects through distinct mechanisms, which we explored via a comparison of estimated effects within the drug classification ontology. We conclude that analysis of observational healthcare data, emulating otherwise costly, large, and lengthy clinical trials, can highlight promising repurposing candidates, to be validated in prospective registration trials, beneficial against common, late-onset progressive diseases for which disease-modifying therapeutic solutions are scarce."