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Nancy Martone Update - use of Gabapentin We just wanted to share the latest update on Nancy's overall condition. Nancy will be 55 soon. This is her 25th year of overcoming as many PD obstacles as she can. Right now she is doing the best she has done in the last 2 years. After a significant deline this summer, Nancy has rebounded once again. Why? While with PD no single solution seems to solve all the PD problems, occasionally something works that really improves the quality of life. We seem to have stumbled on one of those again. After learning that Nancy has developed a hypothyroid condition, .075 mg of synthroid were added to her daily diet of meds. This seemed to make her feel better but did not seem to improve her PD symptoms. About six months ago we added 400mg per day of Amantadine back to her med schedule and her sinemet started working better again. (Starting and stopping amantadine, through careful titration, over the last 10 years has always yielded measurable improvement in all of Nancy's PD symptoms when she restarted the amantadine). This time however we received little benefit for her now very pronounced stooped posture and the attendant hip pain. After trying a variety of pain relievers Nancy's neuro suggested we try Neurontin for the back pain. She started with 1200 mg and started to sleep a lot; day and night. Since there were no other side effects, she was raised to 2400 mg. Today she is taking 3600 mg with no side effects. The beneficial results now are impressive. The hip pain is being managed with a few Ibprofen. She is alert all day long her speech is stronger and less slurred, and she is sleeping all night long. The benefits of her 1995 bilateral pallidotomies (actually two unilateral pal's) continue. She has virtually no dyskinesia, minor tremor and minor rigidity in her extremities but still has major rigidity in her trunk. The benefit of being able to sleep all night long has been wonderful for both of us. Day time living is greatly improved. Nancy has started a bridge group that comes to our house and plays twice a month. There are PD and non-PD players. We are currently managing without a caregiver. I still do the cooking and minor daily cleaning and then we get help on the weekends. Neurontin/Gabapentin in conjunction with Amantadine After obseving these benefits now for several months I started to do a little research on Neurontin/Gabapentin and Amantadine. It appears that both of these meds, Neurontin for sure, and Amantadine maybe, actually work on the brain's glutamate system and serve as a glutamate inhibitor. Glutamate inhibits dopamine at the receptor sites hence if you inhibit glutamate you enhance dopamine. We have reduced Nancy's sinemet intake by 20% or 200 mg with no ill effects. I would like to here from the lists guru's on the use of Gabapentin in the treatment of PD. I discovered that it is used for Lou Gehrigs disease and focal epileptic seizures but haven't found any specific recommendations for its use with PD. I hope this is informative and look forward to a new thread on Neurontin generic form is Gabapentin. Bob Martone [log in to unmask] http://www.kingwoodcable.com/martone/