Studies have long suggested that those who have spent years as smokers may be less likely to get Parkinson's disease (PD). And while physicians would hardly recommend smoking to prevent the onset of any disease, the data is just too compelling to ignore.
Researchers have focused their attention on the nicotine found in cigarettes as a potential therapeutic agent to treat PD. This past month, a clinical trial funded by The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) launched in the U.S. to explore the potential therapeutic benefits of those very same nicotine patches that people take to try and quit smoking.
In this podcast, MJFF Contributing Editor Dave Iverson speaks with James Boyd, MD, the U.S. principal investigator of the study, which is called NIC-PD. “This a study which has been justified for a very long time based on the evidence available,” says Boyd.
NIC-PD is enrolling 160 Parkinson’s disease patients in Germany and the U.S., providing some volunteers with nicotine patches and others with placebo patches, in order to determine if the real ones might have the potential to slow PD progress. Eighty of these patients will be enrolled at 11 centers in the United States.Read this blog to learn more about the rationale behind nicotine as a potential treatment for Parkinson’s.