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HealthDay News – Thirty-six months of treatment with immediate-release isradipine does not slow clinical progression of early-stage Parkinson disease (PD), according to a study published online March 31 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Tanya Simuni, MD, from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues examined the effect of isradipine on the rate of clinical progression of PD in a multicenter randomized trial involving patients with early-stage PD who were not taking dopaminergic medications at enrollment. Three hundred thirty-six patients were randomly assigned to receive either immediate-release isradipine twice daily or placebo for 36 months.
The researchers found that the adjusted least-squares mean changes in total Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale score in the antiparkinson medication ON state were 2.99 points (95% CI, 0.95 to 5.03) and 3.26 points (95% CI, 1.25 to 5.26) over 36 months for isradipine and placebo recipients, respectively, with a treatment effect of −0.27 (95% CI, −3.02 to 2.48; P =.85). No effect of isradipine treatment was seen in secondary outcomes. Edema and dizziness were the most common adverse effects of isradipine.
“These results do not support the hypothesis that isradipine, at this dose, slows the progression of early-stage PD,” the authors write.
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