PARPANIT® IN THE TREATMENT OF PARKINSON'S DISEASE

Abstract

Since the favorable reports of the use of various wine concoctions of belladonna alkaloid in the treatment of Parkinson's disease in 1943 by Price and Merritt 1 and Fabing and Zeligs 2 there has been an effort to develop synthetic products which would act favorably as antispasmodics without the disagreeable side effects on visual accommodation and on secretions, in particular on saliva. In 1946 Domenjoz 3 reported pharmacologic experiments with a variety of synthetic compounds related to trasentin® (the hydrochloride of diphenylacetyldiethylaminoethanol) and found that they had approximately one-tenth the antisecretory effect of atropine, and yet were powerful antispasmodics. The least toxic and most efficient of these was parpanit® (diethylaminoethyl-1-phenylcyclopentane-1-carboxylate hydrochloride), the formula of which appears in figure 1 along with the formulas of scopolamine hydrobromide (hyoscine hydrobromide®) and atropine for comparative purposes. In 1946 Grunthal 4 reported on the use of parpanit® in a number of extrapyramidal