The patients were drawn from an FDA database of more than 2.5 million adverse drug reports dating back to 1968. The analysis of adverse effects found that the strongest association of gambling was with Mirapex. Five other anti-tremor drugs also showed elevated risks but Mirapex accounted for 58% of the reports.
The study is the second in less than a year to link Mirapex to compulsive gambling and the latest findings are consistent with earlier research conducted over the past several years.
In July 2005, a study conducted at the Mayo Clinic, was published in the Archives of Neurology, and identified 11 Parkinson's patients who developed a compulsive gambling problem while taking Mirapex or similar drugs between 2002 and 2004. Since the study was published, 14 additional patients have been identified with the problem, said Mayo psychiatrist, Dr M Leann Dodd, the lead author of the study.
Although a few patients took similar drugs, Dr Dodd said most of the gamblers were on Mirapex. They included a 68-year-old patient who gambled at casinos and lost more than $200,000 over 6 months, a patient who lost more than $60,000, and a 41-year-old computer programmer who took up gambling on the internet, and lost about $5,000 in a few months. All of the patients stopped gambling within a short time after treatment with the drug was discontinued.
According to Dr Dodd, Mayo Clinic doctors now ask patients on the drugs whether they have taken up gambling. Those patients who have are switched to different drugs or doses, and the result is often dramatic, "like a light switch being turned off when they stopped the drug," Dr Dodd told the Associated Press on July 12, 2005.
Two of the patients who were switched to another drug required additional psychiatric treatment to quit gambling and one patient who withdrew from the program committed suicide after a relapse into gambling.
The study above, means that 1 out of the 11 patients committed suicide due to this problem, but according to Joe, "Most of the reporting on this situation has missed the real story."
"There have been many suicide attempts," he reports, "with God only knows how many of them successful."
"There have been countless bankruptcies, lost businesses, ruined professional careers, emptied retirement accounts," Joe says.
The gambling has devastating effects on families. "There has been a horrible toll in wrecked marriages, personal trust and relationships, and familial estrangement caused by this drug," he reports.
And Joe would know. He was a highly respected government employee trusted to work on intelligence-related issues for 25 years before he retired in 1999.
"I held an extremely responsible position, with a Top Secret clearance, at the Defense Department," Joe recounts, "and this drug turned me into a lying, thieving, duplicitous lout for two full years."
The FDA and drug makers have known about the gambling side effect for years. In the August 2003 issue of Neurology, Dr E Driver-Dunckley, Dr J Samanta, and Dr M Stacey published the results of a study in an article entitled “Pathological gambling associated with dopamine agonist therapy in Parkinson’s disease.”
That study found extreme cases of compulsive gambling in nine out of 1,884 patients, with 8 using Mirapex and one patient on the drug pergolide, another dopamine agonist drug.