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Efficacy of methyprednisolone pulse therapy on neuroleptic malignant syndrome in Parkinson’s disease

¹ Department of Neurology, City Hospital, Dudley Road, Birmingham B18 7QH, UK; c.e.clarke@bham.ac.uk

Keywords: prednisolone pulse therapy; Parkinson’s disease; neuroleptic malignant syndrome

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

I was astonished to find that Sato and colleagues were able to identify 40 cases of neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) in patients with Parkinson’s disease from a single institution over three years.¹ At a recent neurosciences grand round in Birmingham, UK, which has an interest in Parkinson’s disease research, we could only recall two such cases in living memory.

There are two possible explanations for this high incidence of NMS. Firstly, in Japan the Parkinson’s disease population may be more prone to developing NMS when their anti-parkinsonian medication is reduced. This could be due to genotypic differences between Japanese and Western populations. Whereas a higher prevalence of the Parkin mutation has been noted in Japan,² judging from the age range and duration of disease given in table 1 of Sato’s report,¹ these were not all young onset patients as one would expect with the Parkin gene. Nevertheless, it would be . . . [Full text of this article]

Y Sato², T Asoh³, N Metoki⁴, K Satoh⁴

² Department of Neurology, Mitate Hospital, 3237 Yugeta, Tagawa 826-0041, Japan
³ Japan Department of Neurology, Futase Social Insurance Hospital, Iizuka, Japan
⁴ Institute of Brain Science, Hirosaki University School of Medicine, Hirosaki, Japan

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr Yoshihiro Sato;
y-sato@ktarn.or.jp