Melvin D. Yahr, 86, Expert in Treatment of Parkinson's, Dies
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
(Embedded image moved to file: pic17458.gif)Dr. Melvin D. Yahr, whose
groundbreaking study of the amino acid L-dopa in the late 1960's helped
establish it as a leading treatment for Parkinson's disease, died on Jan.
1 at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was 86.
The cause was lung cancer, said his daughter Carol Yahr.
Dr. Yahr's work was largely an outgrowth of research by Dr. Arvid
Carlsson, the Nobel laureate who showed in the late 50's that depletions
of the chemical messenger dopamine could set off Parkinson's disease.
Years later, Dr. Yahr, then at Columbia-Presbyterian, enlisted hundreds of
people with Parkinson's to participate in the first clinical trial of
L-dopa, a precursor to dopamine.
After the trial showed positive results, patients suffering from
debilitating symptoms of the disease — including rigidity, a loss of
coordinated movements and tremors — suddenly had a drug that could help
them resume many aspects of their earlier lives.
"Carlsson came up with a revolutionary concept, and Yahr transformed it
into a revolutionary treatment," said Dr. Alessandro Di Rocco, an
associate professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine and the Beth Israel Medical Center.
Almost immediately, L-dopa became widely used. By 1972, barely three years
after Dr. Yahr's study was published, about half of the nation's 1.5
million people with Parkinson's were taking it. Today, L-dopa, despite
some side effects, is by far the most common treatment for Parkinson's,
and it has helped millions of people around the world.
"He was the one that really proved that it worked, and his study
catapulted him to the foreground of Parkinson's research," said Dr. C.
Warren Olanow, chairman of the neurology department at the Mount Sinai
School of Medicine. "It's the gold standard for treatment. Every time we
come up with a new therapy, the question is, Can it do better than
L-dopa?"
One of the doctors who began prescribing L-dopa after Dr. Yahr's study was
Dr. Oliver Sacks, who used it to jump-start patients suffering from
"sleeping sickness," a disorder with symptoms similar to Parkinson's. Dr.
Sacks recounted the drug's miraculous ability to transform his lifeless
patients in the 1974 book "Awakenings," which later became a movie.
Born in New York, Melvin David Yahr earned his bachelor's degree from New
York University's Washington Square College and then his medical degree
from N.Y.U. After three years of military service as an Army lieutenant,
he joined the neurology department at Columbia. From 1973 to 1992, he was
chairman of the neurology department at Mount Sinai and continued seeing
patients and researching Parkinson's there until his death.
Throughout his career, Dr. Yahr helped write more than 300 scientific
papers. In one of them, published in the journal Neurology, he helped
devise the Hoehn-Yahr scale, which breaks Parkinson's into five stages and
is now routinely used by doctors to determine the severity of a case.
The paper is also well known as the last study to document the natural
progression of Parkinson's in untreated patients.
In addition to his daughter Carol, who lives in Manhattan, he is survived
by three other daughters, Nina Yahr and Barbara Yahr, both of Manhattan,
and Laura Yahr of Hastings, N.Y.; a sister, Minna Bernstein; five
grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren.
From The NY Times
K. F. Etzold CG Carline
