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It will be interesting to see if this makes any headlines. While a study published in the December 2006 issue of Movement Disorders found a significantly higher incidence of pathological gambling (PG) among those with PD than among healthy controls, they FAILED to find ANY association between pramipexole alone and PG. They hypothesize that the apparent association btw PD and PG could be due to PD itself, or dopaminergic meds (in general - not dopamine agonists in particular) or both. The strengths of this study as compared to all of the previous studies claiming to find an association between pramipexole and PG are that the same data was collected in the same way from PWP and age/sex-matched healthy controls and then compared, and then also from age/sex-matched PWP who did not gamble pathologically and compared to the data collected from the PWP who did gamble pathologically. Also, they used standard statistical tools to analyze the data looking specifically for associations between PG and pramipexole, PG and depression, and PG and levodopa equivalent daily dose. They found none (i am not sure, given that, how they can conclude that one of the possible culprits could be dopaminergic therapy, but they do.) The weaknesses of this study are the small sample size, which weakens their prevalence findings. Also, they relied on self-reporting of the criteria for PG, which, due to stigma attached to socially unacceptable behaviors, could result in underreporting. This would have been more likely to be the case among the healthy controls, none of whom were accompanied by caregivers, as opposed to PWP, 90% of whom were accompanied by caregivers. Avanzi M, Baratti M, Cabrini S, Uber E, Brighetti G, Bonfa F. Prevalence of pathological gambling in patients with Parkinson's disease.Mov Disord. 2006 Dec;21(12):2068-72. PMID: 17044068 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn http://mail.yahoo.com