A potentially massive breakthrough in Parkinson’s disease treatment.
Dr. Michael Schwarzschild and his team reveal NAC—a liver-protective antioxidant—boosts dopamine efficiency in Parkinson’s patients, per three studies, with the latest in Movement Disorders showing improved brain connectivity linked to better mobility and well-being. Participants on stable medications saw dramatic gains: one lawyer’s behavior shifted noticeably, dubbed a "miracle." This breakthrough hints at NAC’s role as a low-risk, complementary therapy, reshaping integrative approaches to neurodegeneration. [Automatically generated summary]
So you have a fascinating new study that is actually you're demonstrating increased connectivity in the brain for Parkinson's patients through kind of a simple method.
I mean tell me what you found.
So this is our third study on a molecule called N-acetylcysteine or NAC for short.
And this is a powerful antioxidant.
It's also used as a medication in the emergency room, in the hospital for people who take a Tylenol overdose.
It actually protects the liver.
So we know that it does a lot of different things.
But the important thing for us is that it's a precursor to something called glutathione.
Now, why this is important is because glutathione protects the brain when there's oxidative damage or oxidative stress.
And we lose it as we age, and when we get sick, we lose it even more.
So we want to have a way to efficiently increase glutathione in the brain, particularly when we have a neurodegenerative disorder such as Parkinson's disease.
And so we hypothesized early on that giving infused N-acetylcysteine along with oral would increase glutathione and actually have a positive impact on Parkinson's disease.
Parkinson Medications and NAC Infusion00:01:58
We've published three studies on this, and we look at brain scans in all of them.
And what we've seen is that the N-acetylcysteine increases the efficiency of dopamine in the brain, which is the neurotransmitter or chemical that gets lost in Parkinson's disease and causes all of those symptoms.
And our most recent study shows that it improves the way the brain connects to itself or talks to itself, the functional connectivity in the brain.
And this is really exciting because what we consistently see with all of our brain scan studies is that that correlates with improvements in function and how the person feels.
So it's exciting.
And in this last study that we got published in a very good journal for Parkinson's disease, I think that more of the scientific community, particularly neurologists who treat Parkinson's disease, will see it this time.
And, you know, this strikes me as something that can also work in conjunction with other treatments.
Always.
You know, that's part of integrative medicine.
And we're always trying to push the bounds of what we understand in innovative treatments in integrative medicine.
And so we're always thinking about how do we add value to what's out there.
So in this study, people who were on Parkinson's medications, which was all of them, stayed on their Parkinson's medications.
But to be in the study, you couldn't have changes in your Parkinson's medications for a period of time.
And so in both the control group and in the NAC or NAC group, people were on their Parkinson's medications.
But if they got the NAC, they did better.
Their brain came alive in a way that wasn't happening before, and they felt this subjectively.
And we even videotaped a couple of the patients in the study.
One was a lawyer who basically people said it was a miracle how different she looked and acted and functioned.