I found this one.
[www.medicalnewstoday.com]

Sound interesting, But unfortunately Melatonin is not available over the counter in Europe

I find this article very interesting in the aspect of JHD. Melatonin is available at the health food store here in the US. My daughter's neurologist prescribed melatonin several times but we were never able to start due to frequent allergies to seizure medications and the constant battle to control the seizures. (as never trying to change more than one thing at a time & to complicate things my daughter had allergies to other natural herbs). Given that many JHD children have difficulty with sleep patterns, they are often prescribed a sleep aide... wouldn't this be great!

Stacy

Marsha,

What do you think? Melatonin has a bunch of side effects according to a quick web search. It's fairly cheap compared to a lot of supplements. Another beneficial effect I read is lowering blood pressure. I have borderline high BP, so I'd be interested in that good side effect.

Sarmiento - my favorite vendor www.vitaminshoppe.com in the States has all sorts of melatonin and they ship pretty much anywhere in the world.

Will

The article just became available online a couple hours ago, the press release was out last night. I want to read the article carefully before replying. It usually takes me a few days to read the research articles and locate other related material and do an article. I want to educate myself about the new research and then do a write-up that allows other people to be educated too. As potential treatments move through the pipeline we are going to have choices about which trials to sign up for and I want us all to make good informed decisions!

Interesting that this has been a sleep aid for many years especially for travellers going overseas to readjust to new time zones. Sleeping PHDs tend to stop or slow movements while asleep, so what mechanism of the brain take place while asleep might also show some correlation to taking melatonin. Maybe there is a connection.

We are in the UK and my daughters HD consultant mentioned using melatonin to help her sleep at her last visit back in June.Makes me wonder if he had heard of this already somewhere before they released it?She is not using it at present though and we have another check up end of the month on her birthday of all days.I will mention the above to him.Thanks for posting it.

Any info. in regards to dosage??

Here's my coverage of the melatonin research:

[www.hdsa.org]

Melatonin is in clinical and preclinical trials for a lot of things right now and the dosage varies quite a bit. Dosage finding is hard to do in HD because mouse dosages just don't translate to people.

We had Bailey on Melatonin which I didn't have to pay for as it was funded for me. It had to be done by a special pharmacy who did compounding. It was prescribed for sleep but despite changing dosages it didn't do any good.

It is available at health food stores as a tablet but that isn't as concentrated as the compounded liquid form, it had no side effects but as far as stopping degeneration it did absolutely nothing. I believe the compounded form is the best but can be very expensive, the other is more like a herbal medicine - he still didn't sleep and was on it for quite a while. If it had slowed progression I would feel more positive but as he was on it for ages & we still lost him I wouldn't get too excited unless they can find a combination with another drug to make it more effective.



Buddybird