Anyone ever heard of PQQ and whether there has been a clinical test on PD patients ? I found this article and I was impressed by it. It is supposed to slow down aging, make people recover from cognitive problems, prevent aggregation of a-syn in PD, ...
"PQQ is a neuroprotective compound that has been shown in a small number of preliminary studies to protect memory and cognition in aging animals and humans."
If its anything like CoQ10 we will need a lot of it at an exorbitant price.
Personally I accept Im getting older, the reason I cant do some activities when Im "on" is because that was 10 years ago and I was fitter then, So ive started an exercise regime and am feeling the benefits from that.
Years ago I was into the bodybuilding lark. The magazines bombard you with the latest supplements which they deem necessary to your improvement. Eventually I got wise and started buying more fresh food and made a dramatic improvement without l-ornithine or dessicated liver.
Maybe PQQ does work and its what we need since the average life span of humans has increased dramatically in a relatively short period.
I am suspicious of articles like the one you quote, especially when the organisation producing it seems to be in the business in selling dietary supplements!
But please interpret these comments as healthy scepticism rather than cynicism. The topic indeed deserves careful examination:
The article gives a lot of references and some of them are from serious scientific journals. So it does seem that PQQ does have an important role in the body. (It is a big jump, however, to go from the recognition that the compound is important for mitochondrial health and its anti-oxidant properties to proposing that it should be taken to cure diseases Parkinson's.)
It is certainly worth pursuing this further. The article was written more than 4 years ago (2010) and one wonders what has happened since. If researchers thought that it had legs then surely they will have done more work on it and there will be more recent scientific papers in the scientific literature. They would be worth ferreting out.
Do you (or the Parkinson's UK Research Team) have time do a bit more digging around (in PubMed, say) and see what you can find and report back here?
We did a bit of digging and found that, in relation to Parkinson’s, PQQ has only been tested in brain cells in a dish. In these studies, there is some evidence that PQQ can slow or prevent the build of alpha-synuclein, protect cells from toxic free radicals and interact with Parkinson’s related gene DJ-1. But we don’t yet know if it is able to do this in the human brain.
There have been a few studies using animal models to test PQQ for other conditions such as heart problems and memory, but I haven’t been able to find evidence that PQQ has been tested in an animal model of Parkinson’s. I also struggled to find convincing evidence that PQQ has been tested in any large scale, good quality clinical trials in people for any conditions.
If PQQ can help protect cells from toxic damage, protect mitochondria (cell batteries), or prevent the alpha-synuclein from clumping it may be useful in Parkinson's - however we don't know of any current research looking into this. We need both animal studies and a large scale, placebo controlled trial before we know if any of the claims are true. So in this case a bit of health sceptism is warranted.
Could you possibly give references for one or two of the most recent papers that you uncovered so that if any of us following this thread is interested in looking into it further we can have a flying start? Thanks.
Apologies for the delay in coming back to you, I’ve dug out a couple of references below which I hope will be helpful. Unfortunately one of articles require a subscription but I hope the abstract will be helpful.
