Parkinson’s Drug May Help With Brain Injuries, Report Finds

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Daily doses of a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease significantly improved function in severely brain-injured people thought to be beyond the reach of treatment, scientists reported on Wednesday, providing the first rigorous evidence to date that any therapy reliably helps such patients.
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Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

Dr. John Whyte of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute helped lead the study.
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The improvements were modest, experts said, and hardly amounted to a cure, or a quick means of “waking up” someone who has long been unresponsive. But the progress was meaningful, experts said, and, if replicated, would give rehabilitation doctors something they have never had: a standard treatment for injuries that are not at all standard or predictable in the ways they affect the brain.

Some 50,000 to 100,000 Americans live in states of partial consciousness, and perhaps 15,000 in an unresponsive “vegetative” condition. According to the Department of Defense, more than 6,000 veterans have had severe brain injuries since 2000 and would potentially benefit from this therapy. The new report, appearing in The New England Journal of Medicine, gives doctors a solid basis to address such injuries, if not yet a predictable outcome.

“This study puts the traumatic brain injury field on the first step of the ladder to developing scientific treatments. We’ve been trying to get there for a long time,” said Dr. Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, director of clinical research at the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Rockville, Md., who was not involved in the research. “And there’s no reason to doubt that this therapy would also be effective in people with less severe brain injuries” than in the study.