title: Road to Recovery from Parkinsons Disease
author:  Robert Rodgers 
description: Robert Rodgers, PhD, founded Parkinsons Recovery in 2004 to provide support, resources and information to persons currently experiencing the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Robert earned his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University, his master's degree from Cornell University and his PhD from Michigan State University. He served as an officer in the US Navy, an assistant country administrator in Virginia, an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a Professor at the University of Kentucky before founding Parkinsons Recovery. His research is currently focuses on identifying the causes of Parkinson's disease and the alternative therapies that are helping persons reverse their symptoms.
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  Catechol-O-Methyltransferase in
  Parkinson’s Disease
  Ronald F. Pfeiffer
  University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.A.
  The introduction of levodopa therapy for Parkinson’s disease (PD), initially
  by Birkmayer and colleagues in 1961 and Barbeau and colleagues in 1962,
  and in its ultimately successful form by Cotzias and colleagues in 1967, still
  represents the deﬁning landmark in the treatment of PD (1–3). This
  dramatic advance was preceded by methodical basic laboratory research in
  the late 1950s and early 1960s, which formed a groundwork documenting
  the presence of striatal dopamine deﬁciency in PD (4–8) and paved the road
  for the application of this knowledge in the clinical arena.
  These developments took place against a broader backdrop in which
  both the role of catecholamines and their metabolic pathways in body and
  brain were being unraveled (9). As part of this panorama, Axelrod, in 1957,
  ﬁrst suggested that one of the metabolic pathways for catechola