evidence: This month, an exciting development toward learning more about nicotine and PD: A clinical trial sponsored by The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) is launching in the United States to explore the potential therapeutic benefits of those very same nicotine patches that people take to try and quit smoking. NIC-PD will enroll 160 PD patients in Germany and the U.S., providing some volunteers with nicotine patches and others with placebo patches, in order to determine if the real ones might have the potential to slow the progression of PD. Eighty of these patients will be enrolled at 11 centers in the United States, says Cornelia Kamp, the project manager of the American arm of the study. [...] The good news for people with Parkinson’s, says Boyd, is that pre-clinical studies have shown that nicotine could protect dopamine-producing neurons in the brain from dying. But we’ve yet to see this effect in people. NIC-PD will be the first clinical study to begin to get to the bottom of this disease-modifying potential.