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Linda Herman found a MEDSCAPE report on the Sixth International Congress of Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders (in Barcelona, in June 2000) and, on 20 Dec 2000, posted it on PARKINSN. Thank you, Linda, for pointing me to a very interesting report. While my message - below - deals with a flaw in that report, that in no way diminishes my appreciation of your contribution. The Medscape report, by P MAZZONI MD PhD, includes a summary of a presentation by W OERTEL. That summary seems to be wrong. It differs in some important respects - see below - from a report which I believe is the actual conference abstract for the Oertel presentation. I compared the Medscape summary of the Oertel presentation with the report prepared by E-MOVE and posted on PARKINSN some months ago. As far as I can tell, the E-MOVE report is the actual conference abstract [no. M86], published in Movement Disorders 2000; 15 (suppl. 3); see it at http://www.wemove.org/emove/article.asp?ID=223 . Oertel's presentation described the 3-year study known as PELMOPET, designed to compare pergolide (Permax) with levodopa, when one or the other is administered as initial monotherapy. There exist published studies concerning the use of pergolide as adjunct therapy, along with levodopa, but PELMOPET is - I believe - the first study to consider long-term (and initial) monotherapy with pergolide; and it is the first study to look at long-term (and initial) monotherapy with pergolide in comparison with similar use of levodopa. Clearly, PELMOPET considers important questions. The MEDSCAPE summary states that "the participants were 44 patients in the early stages of PD ...". If that were true, I would not pay much attention to this study. For the sort of questions considered by the study, a sample of 44 subjects would be much too small. In fact, according to the abstract provided by E-MOVE, the study involved "two hundred ninety-four de novo PD patients". With such a large sample, the results of the study (to which I'll return in a subsequent posting) are quite credible. My point is this: PELMOPET is an important study, with credible results. The careless error by Mazzoni in the Medscape summary would lead the reader to dismiss this important study - dismiss it as non-credible, due to the inadequate sample size. As the sample size is in fact quite adequate, wrongly dismissing the study would deprive the reade of some important information. For those who wonder how "two hundred ninety-four" mutated to 44, I offer the following. From the group of two hundred ninety-four, the researchers selected a subset of 88 patients who, unlike the others, had fluorodopa PET scans. I would guess that half of them (i.e., 44) were on pergolide, with the other half on levodopa. Ben Winter