Parkinson’s disease is a neurological condition, which means it affects nerve cells. An important chemical messenger in the brain, dopamine (pronounced DOPE-a-meen), is affected in people with Parkinson’s disease. Dopamine is an essential messenger that communicates movement signals from the brain to the rest of the body. Parkinson’s disease reduces dopamine production in the brain by causing specific brain cells to die. When these brain cells die, dopamine production goes down, too.
When the brain’s dopamine production is reduced by Parkinson’s disease, body movement is affected. For the Parkinson’s disease patient, movement may become more uncontrolled, with movement at rest (tremor or shaking), too little movement (bradykinesia, pronounced BRAY-dee-kin-EE-zee-ah), or stiffness (rigidity).
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REQUIP belongs to a group of medicines called dopamine agonists (pronounced DOPE-a-meen AG-oh-nists) that imitate the effect of dopamine in the brain to help control movement. REQUIP helps reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease by improving control of various body movements, which may begin to slow or become irregular in early Parkinson’s disease.
