Parkinson's disease is a disease of dopamine deficiency in the brain.

You can't just have people take dopamine because it can't pass through the blood-brain barrier,

but you can give people a dopamine precursor called L-dopa,

or L-dopa, which can get up into the brain and be turned into dopamine.

However, with prolonged treatment, patients start to show a reduced response to levitopa.

After five years of levitopa treatment, the benefits start wearing off before the next

dose or don't completely contain symptoms in a substantial proportion of patients and

represents a major source of disability and significantly impairs quality of life.

Therefore, maximizing the therapeutic efficiency of

levitopa is an important goal, and that's where protein-restricted diets come in.

Wait, what does protein have to do with Parkinson's? Certain amino acids in proteins have been

proven to impair the therapeutic effect of

Leavidopa by reducing its absorption and influx into the brain, because they use the same

transporter so can crowd each other out.

Here's a before-and-after PET scan, showing Leavidopa activity in the brain before and after

protein loading.

That's why protein-restricted diets can improve the efficacy of levidopa. There are three ways to do that.

In overall, low-protein diet, a so-called protein redistribution diet,

or a combination of the two.

As a dietary strategy, a low-protein diet, it's nice because it's not only effective,

but also simple to understand and follow.

And by low protein, we're just talking about sticking to the recommended amount of protein,

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