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Paul S. Papavasiliou; George C. Cotzias; Simone E. Düby; Andreas J. Steck; Margaret Bell; William H. Lawrence
Brookhaven National Laboratory Upton, Long Island

JAMA. 1972;221(1):88-89.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Lerner discovered melatonin (N-Acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine)¹ and showed that this pineal hormone can induce sedation in man.² This agent antagonizes the darkening of the skin and, therefore, perhaps also some other action of melanophore-stimulating hormone (βMSH).³ Since injections of βMSH had aggravated the tremor of parkinsonism,⁴ we had administered this antagonist of βMSH to a patient but induced only a diminution of tremor.³ Others, however, reported impressive improvement of several symptoms of parkinsonism⁵ at a time when we had reversed the adventitious movements caused by levodopa [3-(3, 4-dihydroxyphenyl)-L-alanine] with melatonin in experimental animals.⁶ We conducted therefore a single-blind study in patients with parkinsonism who received either melatonin alone or melatonin plus levodopa, which had caused intermittent adventitious movements.⁷

The inpatients listed in the Table and all of the outpatients had idiopathic parkinsonism except patient 11 who had postencephalitic disease. Among . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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