New study: coffee has no effect on Parkinson's dyskinesia

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Although there is evidence that caffeine may be beneficial in relieving Parkinson's disease, regular cups of coffee do not improve tremors and dyskinesia caused by Parkinson's disease, according to a new clinical trial.

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Dr. Ronald Postuma, assistant professor of neurology and lead researcher at McGill University Health Center, said early short-term clinical trials showed that caffeine improved motor function in a small group of Parkinson's patients, UPI reported. However, according to the results of the current long-term trial, caffeine has no effect on improving symptoms after receiving trial treatment for 6 to 18 months.

"caffeine doesn't affect Parkinson's disease," he said. "you can't use it as a treatment for Parkinson's disease." The findings are disappointing for many Parkinson's patients, some of whom have turned to coffee to help them improve their symptoms.

Although the early caffeine treatment trial lasted only six weeks, the short-term improvement immediately caused a sensation in the media, according to Bostumar, which was published in the Journal of Neurology in 2012. Many news media are spreading the news, causing many patients to start drinking coffee, but medical experts did not give this advice. Speaking of the new study, he said, "We need to verify this."

According to the National Parkinson's Foundation, Parkinson's disease is a progressive brain disease that occurs when a person's brain slows down and stops producing the neurotransmitter dopamine, and with the decrease of dopamine in the brain, people's ability to regulate physical movements and emotions becomes weaker and weaker.

Previously, some pharmaceutical companies have begun to use drugs to block adenosine to improve Parkinson's dyskinesia, a neurotransmitter that inhibits muscle movement. The treatment also prompted Dr. Bostumar and his colleagues to study whether caffeine, the cheapest adenosine receptor blocker, could be used to treat Parkinson's disease.

To that end, in the initial study, the researchers recruited 121 patients with Parkinson's disease, with an average age of four years. Half of them received 200 milligrams of caffeine capsules a day, the equivalent of three cups of coffee a day. The rest took a placebo. Results the motor function of children who took caffeine improved after six weeks.

However, after a long-term follow-up comparison between the caffeine group and the placebo group, the researchers found no improvement in motor disorders in the caffeine group. The researchers eventually abandoned the early conclusions of the study.

But Bostumar also points out that some other studies have shown that people who don't drink coffee have a higher risk of Parkinson's disease.

Although the final results are disappointing, Charles Hall, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York, believes that the entire study shows that the possibility of obtaining evidence from early or small trials is huge before large-scale and long-term results are confirmed. Regardless of the outcome, repeated small experiments bring hope to the future, and people should not make cynicism about scientific research because of failure.

The final clinical trial results are published in the Sept. 27 issue of the journal Neurology.