Rotigotine Transdermal Patch Improves Swallowing Functions in Patients With Parkinson’s Disease

Would this help in stroke patients? Once again our stroke associations will fail by not following up on this with appropriate research. You'll have to wait 50 years because we have NO stroke strategy and no one that is even documenting anything resembling a strategy. We have NO stroke strategy by any of our stroke associations. They are all JUST WAITING FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM!
http://dgnews.docguide.com/rotigotine-transdermal-patch-improves-swallowing-functions-patients-parkinson-s-disease? 
 The rotigotine transdermal patch improves swallowing functions in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who have difficulty swallowing, according to a study presented here on September 27 at the 140th Annual Meeting of the American Neurological Association (ANA).
“Abnormal swallowing, or dysphagia, is a potentially fatal symptom in Parkinson’s disease, and several studies have reported that the injection of apomorphine, a dopamine agonist, alleviated dysphagia in some patients with PD,” said Makito Hirano, MD, Nara Medical University School of Medicine, Nara, Japan. “Rotigotine is another dopamine agonist with non-oral administration, and its non-invasiveness seems to render this medicine even more suitable than apomorphine for patients with dysphagia.”
To investigate the efficacy of the rotigotine transdermal patch for dysphagia, the researchers conducted a retrospective, open-label study in which they evaluated swallowing functions using videofluoroscopic (VF) examination in 7 patients with PD and dysphagia (5 males and 2 females) at baseline and 1 to 2 weeks after treatment.
The evaluation was based on the scale established by the Japanese Society of Dysphagia Rehabilitation, which can separately assess oral and pharyngeal phases. The researchers also used Pharyngeal Transit Duration (PTD), as well as the Dysphagia Outcome Severity Scale (DOSS) to evaluate swallowing functions.
While the DOSS scores did not show significant changes, there were statistically significant improvements in PTD and in the Japanese scale scores during the oral and pharyngeal phases (P < .05, Wilcoxon signed-rank test).
Dr. Hirano stressed that the study objectively showed -- for the first time -- using videofluoroscopic examination, that rotigotine improved swallowing in patients with dysphagia with PD.
“Although antiparkinsonian medications are thought to improve swallowing during the oral phase, characterised mainly by voluntary movements, our results showed that rotigotine additionally improved swallowing during the pharyngeal phase, associated mainly with sequential reflexes of striatal muscles,” he said.
[Presentation title: Improvement of Swallowing Functions by Rotigotine Transdermal Patch in Patients With Parkinson’s Disease. Abstract S427]