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Fatta Nahab wrote: > ... It is when the body's Serotonin levels drop that patients > develop more serious akinetic symptoms which are characteristic of > the more serious Type B Parkinson's. According to Dr. Iacono, the > lack of Serotonin in these patients causes them to experience > "sleep-wake cycle inversion", (whereby the might fall asleep at any > time of the day), "fractionated sleep", (causing them to wake up > multiple times during the night), and depression. It is for these > reasons that physicians prescribe SSRI's (Selective Serotonin > Reuptake Inhibitors) such as Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft. In addition > to these medications, Dr. Iacono recommends that all his patients > take a B-complex vitamin AT NIGHT along with a Banana. Banana's, > turkey, and peanuts are foods rich in tryptophan, a precursor of > Serotonin which requires B vitamins to produce Serotonin. I'm grateful for the information, I think. This puts 2 and 2 together very well. I wonder why serotonin isn't mentioned more in connection with PD. Low serotonin is associated with insomnia, as mentioned above, and also with depression, which occurs a lot with PD. I did a quick Medline search and found a small number of abstracts of articles about PD and serotonin (a sample: Medline numbers 90213187, 93226199, 94236434, and 97065849). They all indicate that a good proportion, but not all, of PWPs have low serotonin levels. Understanding PD gives me a sense (or illusion?) of control that's not in this case cancelled out by the knowledge that another neurotransmitter is in short supply, because we can do something about the shortage through nutrition (greater ingestion of foods containing tryptophan). Pure l-tryptophan used to be available in the USA, but it got banned (due to impurities, I've heard), and I couldn't find it in my local health food store. It's available in Canada, however. Phil Tompkins