Case of the Frozen Addicts
Case of the Frozen Addicts In the summer of 1982, hospital emergency rooms in the San Francisco Bay Area were suddenly confronted with mysteriously "frozen" patients - young men and women who, though…
Specifikacia Case of the Frozen Addicts
Case of the Frozen Addicts
In the summer of 1982, hospital emergency rooms in the San Francisco Bay Area were suddenly confronted with mysteriously "frozen" patients - young men and women who, though conscious, could neither move nor speak. William Langston, recognizing the symptoms of advanced Parkinson's disease, administered L-dopa - the only known effective treatment - and "unfroze" his patient. Dr. Doctors were baffled, until neurologist J.
This same area, the substantia nigra, slowly deteriorates in Parkinson's disease. Langston determined that this patient and five others had all used the same tainted batch of synthetic heroin, inadvertently laced with a toxin that had destroyed an area of their brains essential to normal movement. As scientists raced to capitalize on this breakthrough, Dr.
Langston struggled to salvage the lives of his frozen patients, for whom L-dopa provided only short-term relief. The