Health Spotlight | Parkinson’s symptom rarely mentioned: Hallucinations
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Visual hallucinations affect up to 75% of Parkinson’s patients, causing them to see people and animals that aren’t really there. Now, medication that targets these hallucinations, through a different neurotransmitter in the brain, is helping one patient who was diagnosed in his 40s.
Adrian Mireles was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in his early 40s.
“It used to take me a good half-hour, before I could get out of bed, after I was awake to get everything settled, so I kinda realized where I was at,” Mireles said.
Then, the tremors would start.
“What people don’t understand — with Parkinson’s, it affects a lot of you,” Mireles said. “Not just, people think oh, it makes you shake. The shaking is the least of your problems.”
He struggled to follow conversations. And most unsettling of all, when he drove to work, he began seeing things like a bobcat in the road.
“And the first couple times, I slammed my brakes, you know,” Mireles said. “To not hit it, and then got there, and it wasn’t there.”
According to the Parkinson’s Foundation, up to 70% of patients suffer hallucinations.
“Hallucinations can be present during the day, at night and can be very disruptive for the day-to-day of these patients. There is always this risk of them losing contact with their reality,” said Dr. Juan Ramirez-Castaneda, M.D., Movement Disorders neurologist at Movement Disorders Clinic, director of Deep Brain Stimulation Program, director of Methodist Outpatient Neurology, and medical director at Methodist Physicians.
Ramirez-Castaneda prescribed an atypical anti-psychotic drug called Pimavanserin, trade name Nuplazid, which targets serotonin receptors.
“Activating these receptors can help tailor the psychosis or hyperactivity that happens in the brain,” Ramirez-Castaneda said.
It’s the first antipsychotic that works on the neurotransmitter serotonin, and not dopamine, known to be a cause of Parkinson’s.
Antipsychotics carry strong warning labels and Parkinson’s patients should always check with their doctors to see if the risks outweigh the benefits.
This story was created from a script aired on WISH-TV. Health Spotlight is presented by Community Health Network.