Parkinson's Medications linked to compulsive gambling

Do you have Parkinson's? If so be careful you do not lose control of your gambling habits. New research shows that medication for Parkinson's disease means increased risk of developing compulsive gambling habits or other addiction as buying mania or sex addiction. In fact it is up to one in every 10 Parkinson’s patients who develops an addiction of some sort.

Preliminary results from research at Aarhus University hospital shows that men with Parkinson’s in the 40s and have an outgoing personality have the greatest risk of developing a gambling addiction. For the research the researchers have used a particular brain scan technique to find out how the medicine with so-called dopamine agonists affects the patients' brains.

- There is a subgroup of Parkinson’s patients who develop a form of impulse control disorder. The risk factor is there if you are a man who gets the disease at a young age and you have an outgoing personality. We do not know why it poses a risk. We just know that it is the group that most frequently appears, says Arne Moller, who is a research physician at the PET Centre in Aarhus, Jutland to DR.

Also in the U.S. there is debate over whether Parkinson’s medication with dopamine agonists is harmful. Back in the spring the American Parkinson's patient Morton Wylie from North Lanarkshire sued his doctor and the health system, after having been prescribed the drug Ritigotine, which should have been the reason that he lost $85,000 on gambling.

According to Wylie, after a year of medication he developed, an uncontrollable urge to gamble, which he had never experienced before he started taking Ritigotine. At Aarhus University Hospital the research continues and it is hoped in the near future to confirm or deny suspicions about the relationship between addiction and Parkinson's medication.