Do some Parkinson's medicines stop working over time?

The drugs for Parkinson's treatment continue to work but it is the brain that changes over time, resulting in less potency, explains HealthMaker Melissa Houser, MD, a neurologist at Scripps Health. In this video, she says doses have to be escalated.

Transcript

00:00

And that drug also tends to cause a condition called dyskinesia, which is the wiggles, patients that move

00:07

involuntarily, when their dose is probably at its peak [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:26

You're talking about the drug, the mainstay drug for Parkinson's disease, which is levodopa. Levodopa is converted into dopamine.

00:34

And it's not quite that the drug stops working. It's just that with regulation of the system,

00:41

with long-term Parkinson's disease coupled with that medication, the brain starts to change in a way

00:47

that the medicine doesn't work as well. So you have to jack up the dose, and then it works for a while, and then it stops working as well.

00:55

Eventually, you have to jack up the dose to where the therapeutic window is so small, you're taking it multiple times a day

01:02

with maybe just a little bit of benefit. And that drug also tends to cause a condition called

01:08

dyskinesia, which is the wiggles, patients that move involuntarily, when their dose is probably at its peak.

01:17

And with prolonged use of that drug in relatively high doses, it can set you up for these motor complications.