I'm sure I read this some time ago...
May 6, 1999
Ecstasy May Be Linked To Parkinson's Disease
BOSTON (Reuters) - Repeated use of the hallucinogen ecstasy can lead to
Parkinson's disease, three University
of Michigan doctors have suggested in a letter to the New England
Journal of Medicine.
The claim is based on the case of a 29-year-old man who had taken
ecstasy nine times in 1997 and once in May
1998, three months before he began developing symptoms.
At first, he seemed clumsier than normal. Then, over a one-month period,
he began to have trouble walking, and
lost his ability to write and drive.
Tests showed he had Parkinson's disease, a brain condition that
typically appears in middle-aged and elderly
people. It results in stiff, weak and trembling muscles, and an
unbalanced walk.
``Although we have no firm evidence of a causal relation between this
patient's drug use and his parkinsonism, there
are no other tenable explanations,'' said the doctors, led by Scott
Mintzer.
The patient's symptoms did not improve with drug treatment.
The psychotropic drug popular with some U.S. psychiatrists and
psychologists in the 1970s and '80s for
relationship therapy, was never approved by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration. A 1995 Johns Hopkins
study linked ecstasy with brain damage in animals.
Copyright © 1999 Reuters Limited.
--
Judith Richards, London, Ontario, Canada
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