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! 

Rotigotine Transdermal Patch Improves Swallowing Functions in Patients With 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]

The effects of the dopamine agonist rotigotine on hemispatial neglect following stroke

You'll have to ask your doctor about this.
http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=22761293
Hemispatial neglect following right-hemisphere stroke is a common and disabling disorder, for which there is currently no effective pharmacological treatment. Dopamine agonists have been shown to play a role in selective attention and working memory, two core cognitive components of neglect. Here, we investigated whether the dopamine agonist rotigotine would have a beneficial effect on hemispatial neglect in stroke patients. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled ABA design was used, in which each patient was assessed for 20 testing sessions, in three phases: pretreatment (Phase A1), on transdermal rotigotine for 7-11 days (Phase B) and post-treatment (Phase A2), with the exact duration of each phase randomized within limits. Outcome measures included performance on cancellation (visual search), line bisection, visual working memory, selective attention and sustained attention tasks, as well as measures of motor control. Sixteen right-hemisphere stroke patients were recruited, all of whom completed the trial. Performance on the Mesulam shape cancellation task improved significantly while on rotigotine, with the number of targets found on the left side increasing by 12.8% (P = 0.012) on treatment and spatial bias reducing by 8.1% (P = 0.016). This improvement in visual search was associated with an enhancement in selective attention but not on our measures of working memory or sustained attention. The positive effect of rotigotine on visual search was not associated with the degree of preservation of prefrontal cortex and occurred even in patients with significant prefrontal involvement. Rotigotine was not associated with any significant improvement in motor performance. This proof-of-concept study suggests a beneficial role of dopaminergic modulation on visual search and selective attention in patients with hemispatial neglect following stroke.

The effects of the dopamine agonist rotigotine on hemispatial neglect following stroke

Ask your doctor if this will help your neglect, I had a mild case that resolved in a couple of weeks.
http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=22761293
Hemispatial neglect following right-hemisphere stroke is a common and disabling disorder, for which there is currently no effective pharmacological treatment. Dopamine agonists have been shown to play a role in selective attention and working memory, two core cognitive components of neglect. Here, we investigated whether the dopamine agonist rotigotine would have a beneficial effect on hemispatial neglect in stroke patients. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled ABA design was used, in which each patient was assessed for 20 testing sessions, in three phases: pretreatment (Phase A1), on transdermal rotigotine for 7-11 days (Phase B) and post-treatment (Phase A2), with the exact duration of each phase randomized within limits. Outcome measures included performance on cancellation (visual search), line bisection, visual working memory, selective attention and sustained attention tasks, as well as measures of motor control. Sixteen right-hemisphere stroke patients were recruited, all of whom completed the trial. Performance on the Mesulam shape cancellation task improved significantly while on rotigotine, with the number of targets found on the left side increasing by 12.8% (P = 0.012) on treatment and spatial bias reducing by 8.1% (P = 0.016). This improvement in visual search was associated with an enhancement in selective attention but not on our measures of working memory or sustained attention. The positive effect of rotigotine on visual search was not associated with the degree of preservation of prefrontal cortex and occurred even in patients with significant prefrontal involvement. Rotigotine was not associated with any significant improvement in motor performance. This proof-of-concept study suggests a beneficial role of dopaminergic modulation on visual search and selective attention in patients with hemispatial neglect following stroke.

Skin patch improves attention span in stroke patients

So I wonder what else stimulates dopamine receptors? maybe Ritalin from this research in 1998. Doesn't anyone follow previous research? Where is the 1998 research in the stroke therapy protocol? Who has the stroke therapy protocol?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-skin-patch-attention-span-patients.html
Hemi-spatial neglect, a severe and common form of inattention that can be caused by brain damage following a stroke, is one of the most debilitating symptoms, frequently preventing patients from living independently. When the right side of the brain has suffered damage, the patient may have little awareness of their left-hand side and have poor memory of objects that they have seen, leaving them inattentive and forgetful. Currently there are few treatment options.
The randomised control trial took 16 patients who had suffered a stroke on the right-hand side of their brain and assessed to see whether giving the drug rotigotine improved their ability to concentrate on their left-hand side. The results showed that even with treatment for just over a week, patients who received the drug performed significantly better on attention tests than when they received the placebo treatment.
Rotigotine acts by stimulating receptors on nerve cells for dopamine, a chemical normally produced within the brain.
Professor Masud Husain who led the study at the Institute of Neurology at UCL says: “Inattention can have a devastating effect on stroke patients and their families. It impacts on all aspects of their lives. If the results of our clinical trial are replicated in further, larger studies, we will have overcome a major hurdle towards providing a new treatment for this important consequence of stroke.
“Milder forms of inattention occur in other brain disorders, across all ages - from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to Parkinson’s disease. Our findings show that it is possible to alter attention by using a drug that acts at specific receptors in the brain, and therefore have implications for understanding the mechanisms that might cause inattention in conditions other than stroke.”
The work, published in the journal Brain, was funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Wellcome Trust.