Ensuring Good Quality of Life With Good ON Time in Parkinson Disease: Khash Dashtipour, MD, PhD

WATCH TIME: 5 minutes

“Our goal in Parkinson disease [care]—basically, what we’re going to achieve—is improving their quality of life and offering them ON time continuously throughout the day. That’s our goal. Currently, we have good tools, but still there are challenges. One of the most common challenges we have is a good understanding of ON time and about motor fluctuations. It’s not uncommon that healthcare providers, even, not only patients, don’t know what they have to target to achieve that.”

At the 2nd Annual Advanced Therapeutics in Movement and Related Disorders (ATMRD) Congress, held by the PMD Alliance from June 8 to 11, 2023, in Washington, DC, a number of presenters offered insight into the concept of “good ON time” in Parkinson disease (PD). Generally, this is qualified as time a given patient is experiencing benefit from their medication without any related troublesome symptoms, such as dyskinesia. Currently, many therapies in the paradigm of treatment offer benefit in improving ON, but PD remains a challenging disorder to treat, and thus clinicians need to be able to provide ways for patients to combat the wearing off of medications and the associated effects of those treatments.

Khash Dashtipour, MD, an associate professor of neurology and the director of the Movement Disorders Division at Loma Linda University, is one such individual who spoke at the meeting about this key distinction related to ON time, and how important it is to provide the best clinical care. While in the US capitol city, Dashtipour sat down with NeurologyLive® to discuss some of the difficulties associated with this goal of care—namely, the complexity of PD and how it affects the efficacy of therapy.

He offered his perspective on the current ability of physicians to provide good ON time for patients, how to improve patients’ quality of life with proper and personalized treatment, and the need for additional education on the available tools to address OFF symptoms. Dashtipour also touched on some of the challenges in addressing the nonmotor symptoms of PD and getting adequate adherence to treatment regimens in clinical care.

Click here for more coverage of ATMRD 2023.