Effectiveness of Integrative Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease Management

Woo, Yeonju; Hyun, Min Kyung

The most typical medication for PD is levodopa; however, its long-term use results in decreased efficacy, motor fluctuation, and dyskinesia in about 75% of patients (Fahn et al., 2004) . Integrative therapy group II (N = 26) 3 (11.5%) 0.35 (0.10-1.25) 0.105 OR, odds ratio; C.I., confidence interval; monotherapy group, treated by biomedicine only; integrative therapy group, treated by biomedicine and KM; integrative therapy group I, KM treatment less than 30 days; integrative therapy group II, KM treatment over than 30 days; d/t, due to; PD, Parkinson's disease. * Statistically significant (p < 0.05). The prevalence of melanoma in PD patients taking levodopa is significantly higher than that of the general population (Shalaby and Louis, 2016) . Dementia in PD patients is a common complication of PD that makes treatment difficult and leads to disability. Depression is also a common complication of PD (Brown and Marsden, 1984; Cummings, 1992) , and infectious diseases such as pneumonia are considered factors that increase mortality in PD patients (Pinter et al., 2015) . Additionally, patients with a longer duration of PD have more complications and lower quality of life (Ou et al., 2018) . Subthalamic stimulation has been attempted to improve quality of life with positive results. However, surgery can be accompanied by unintended adverse events, even death (Dafsari et al., 2018) . Therefore, the use of relatively safe treatment regimens such as CAM should be considered. This study investigated whether KM could reduce hospitalization in the management of PD patients in the South Korea. Two groups of patients, an integrative therapy group using both biomedicine and KM and a monotherapy group using only biomedicine, were compared by PS estimation and matching based on confounders such as sex, age, comorbidity, and anti-parkinsonism medication. The prevalence of hospitalization because of pneumonia/sepsis was significantly lower (0.50 times) in the integrative therapy group than the monotherapy group. Traditional medicine may have beneficial immunomodulatory effects for preventing viral infections (Poon et al., 2006) . For severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), advantages to treatment with integrative Chinese medicine and biomedicine were observed when compared with that of biomedicine alone, especially with respect to improvement of clinical symptoms, promotion of the recovery of immune function and reduction of treatment duration (Qiang et al., 2003) . Hence, KM seems to have a positive effect on infectious diseases such as pneumonia and sepsis.