People suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease could benefit long-term from continuous delivery of medication through a device similar to an insulin pump, a recent French study found. Published in Nature Partner Journals with the Parkinson’s Foundation, the real-world observational study followed 110 patients being treated at the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris. The second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s is sometimes treated with the medication apomorphine to lessen symptoms such as shaking, stiffness or slowness of movement. It helps replace the dopamine typically lacking in Parkinson’s patients, but taken orally it can cause dopamine to spike and then drop, leading to dyskinesia or muscle spasms. “For those patients, continuous delivery is a good option,” study co-author and neurologist Emmanuel Flamand-Roze told AFP. A randomised, placebo-controlled study of Parkinson’s patients in 23 European hospitals already found in 2018 that medication administered using the device reduced “off-time” – the period when symptoms worsen as medication wears off. Flamand-Roze said his real-world observational study provided an essential...