2023-10-11 08:25:29
by Danilo di Diodoro
You can be restless, anxious or take life’s events with apathy and an inability to feel pleasure. Sometimes it’s the drugs
Known above all for the movement disorders it causes, such as tremors, rigidity and awkward gait, but Parkinson’s disease also involves alterations to the vegetative nervous system and changes in the ability to process emotions.
Emotional changes
These little-known changes are one of the topics covered during the Parkinson Body and Soul Convention organized in Turin by the Limpe Foundation. The person with Parkinson’s disease can react abnormally to life events capable of arousing emotions, says Mario Zppia, professor of Neurology at the University of Catania. Anxiety is often the result of improperly processed emotions, which can manifest itself in the form of restlessness, or through physical symptoms, such as motor restlessness. Other times the result is a lowered mood, with apathy, the inability to feel pleasure, and alexithymia, the inability to recognize one’s emotions. Emotional alterations that can also affect the family and generate relational problems. These emotional changes are understandable if we consider that dopamine, the neurotransmitter deficient in some areas of the brain of a person with Parkinson’s, is deficient not only in the neuronal circuits that modulate motor skills, but also in the limbic system – the oldest part of our brain – which regulates emotional reactions such as anger, pain, fear, joy.
Influence of drugs
In recent years there has been widespread awareness that some emotional alterations in those suffering from Parkinson’s disease may also be related to the drugs used to treat it. In fact, antiparkinsonian drugs can cause emotional fluctuations, as happens when the effect of an administration of levodopa, the drug which is transformed into dopamine in the brain, ends. Fluctuations characterized by anxiety and agitation that remain until the next dose is taken. Other unfavorable effects are due to chronic therapy with some drugs that mimic the action of dopamine, such as dopamine agonists, which can induce impulsive control disorders, characterized by strong emotional tension which can be followed by poorly controllable behaviors, such as gambling. gambling, compulsive shopping, hypersexuality.
Possible interventions
In addition to these emotional changes, real mental disorders can also occur during Parkinson’s disease, such as forms of depression which sometimes appear even before the motor symptoms. In the more advanced stages of the disease, however, psychotic forms sometimes develop with hallucinations and delirium – says Zppia -, especially in relation to high doses of dopaminergic drugs, which are nevertheless necessary to counteract the motor symptoms. Fortunately, today neurologists, especially if they are experts in movement diseases, have acquired great sensitivity and competence in recognizing the emotional alterations and psychological disorders of people with Parkinson’s in the various phases of the disease. Today, great attention is also paid to communicating the diagnosis: an extremely delicate moment that the patient often experiences as a profound trauma.
Discovering that you have a neurodegenerative disease induces anxiety, alters the quality of sleep and can induce depression. It is therefore necessary to relate to the person with empathy, to accompany them on a path of acceptance and awareness, which allows them to develop all their resources to counteract, even emotionally, the progression of the disease, the so-called empowerment. Fortunately, today we have drugs that allow us to treat the emotional and mental distress of people with Parkinson’s, even if it is becoming increasingly necessary to pay attention to multiple therapies in fragile patients, often with significant comorbidities. In some cases, for the well-being of the people being treated, it is necessary, rather than adding new pharmacological prescriptions, to attempt to suspend previously prescribed therapies or reduce the dosage, to achieve better clinical well-being also on an emotional and psychological level, he concludes.
October 11, 2023 (modified October 11, 2023 | 08:25)
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#Parkinsons #alter #reaction #emotions #time.news