The first day on the tweaked dose went OK, no fantastic change, but I didn’t expect that either. Let me try explaining in some more detail, how the different Parkinson’s medication works.
Remember the different types of Parkinson’s medication I mentioned yesterday?
Let’s call the levo-dopa based medication type A. Further, let’s call the kind that imitates the effects of dopamine type B. You might remember that there are two kinds of Parkinson’s medication that inhibits the transformation of dopamine into other chemicals. One type has no effect by itself, but only when taken at the same time as type A, we can call this kind of medication type C. And let’s call the last kind type D. All these different drugs behave differently in the body, they have different uptake rates and biological half-lives (this is where my background in chemical engineering comes very handy). And this, as you might realise, results in an extremely complicated system of different chemical reactions, that in an ideal situation would give me an even concentration of the substances lacking in my brain. Unfortunately, there is no easy way of measuring the concentration of these substances, so instead I try measuring the effect of these substances, meaning that I try to find ways to evaluate my different symptoms objectively, but more about the measurements in a later post.
My “old” medication regimen consisted of:
6 am: A+B+C+D
11:30 am: A
3 pm: A+B+C
6:30 pm: A+B
9 pm: C
10:30 pm: A
As you can see, the regimen is in no way simple, but it has served me very well for the last few years. You might notice that my 11:30 dose consisted of only a type A and if you have been really paying attention, you might wonder why I don’t enhance the effect of the A with a C…. which is exactly what I have done. My “new” regimen is identical with the old one, save dose number 2 of the day. I now take it half an hour earlier and have added a type C. This might sound like a ridiculously small change, but I want to reduce the risk of getting unpleasant side effects. I use my iPhone, iPad and laptop to monitor the effect of the change. More about that later.