Re: NEWS-Skull Surgery Fails for Parkinson's

["Robert A. Fink, M. D." <rafink@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Date sent:              Thu, 8 Mar 2001 01:21:05 -0500
Send reply to:          Parkinson's Information Exchange Network 
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From:                   Judith Richards <judithr@xxxxxxxx>
Organization:           @Home Network
Subject:                NEWS-Skull Surgery Fails for Parkinson's
To:                     PARKINSN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> I just sent:
> "Brain Cell Transplants Help Parkinson's Patients" and now we have...
>
>
> Skull Surgery Fails for Parkinson's
>  By JANET McCONNAUGHEY, Associated Press Writer
>
> March 7, 2001 An experimental treatment for Parkinson's in which holes
> are drilled in the skull and cells from aborted fetuses are implanted
> in the brain does not cure the disease, according to a controversial
> new study.
>
> The study had raised ethical questions because some participants, for
> the sake of comparison, underwent sham surgery in which mere
> indentations were drilled in their heads.
>
> The implanted stem cells - cells that can develop into many types of
> tissue - survived and grew into the right kind of brain cells. But
> they did not help patients older than 60.
>
> Younger patients - who make up about 40 percent of the 60,000 people
> diagnosed each year in the United States - improved a bit, but only
> for a year.
>
> After that, the cells apparently did their job too well in some
> patients, causing excess movements because they produced more of the
> needed nerve transmitter dopamine than the body could use.
>

This is exactly the reason that I have always been so "conservative"
about "new advances" (pallidotomy, etc.).  Here we have the identical
study, published in the identical medical journal, with two completely
different "spins" placed upon the same results by the lay press.

Furthermore, this "breakthrough" was reported by *me* back in
January, 2000 as part of a meeting which I attended of the California
Association of Neurological Surgeons in San Francisco, where one of
the authors of this same study, Dr. Stanley Fahn, said the same thing
(that the procedure didn't work in older patients, and that dyskinesias
were a severe problem in the younger patients).  He also stated that he
didn't know *how long* the beneficial effects would last (and, over a
year later, we are told that in some cases, the duration of benefit was
temporary).  Dr. Fahn said then (and I reported to the List in January
2000) that cell implantation surgery "was not ready for prime time".

Good medical research takes science.  The best of intentions do not
make things advance faster or better.


Best,

Bob


Robert A. Fink, M. D.
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