Iaconi Ala I, Zimmerman Marliese A, Kulkarni Amit S, Balkrishnan Rajesh
Ohio State University College of Pharmacy, 500 W. 12th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Expert Opin Pharmacother. 2008 Feb;9(2):163-74. doi: 10.1517/14656566.9.2.163.
Parkinson's disease (PD) affects nearly 1 million Americans with a mean onset age of 60 years. Its progressive, neurodegenerative nature, causing motor complications and affecting mood, has a considerable impact on a patient's health-related quality of life. Pharmacologic therapies are the most widely utilized treatment. The broad range of drugs for treating PD warrants an assessment of each medication's health-related outcomes, which includes consideration of clinical, economic and patient-centered outcomes. This review seeks to explore the outcomes associated with drugs frequently appearing in the literature of the past 5 years and to comment on the direction of pharmacologic research and management of PD pharmacotherapy in the future.
