Aromatic amines and Parkinson's disease

Abstract

BECAUSE most of the previous work published on aromatic amines in relation to Parkinson's disease was on either dopamine1-8, tyramine9,10 or tryptamine11, and was only qualitative or semi-quantitative, we thought it would be of value to carry out a quantitative analysis of all three amines in the urine of normal and Parkinsonian patients. Because of the different aetiologies, we restricted our study to the idiopathic type of the disease - paralysis agitans. Our methods were chiefly fluorimetric and the results were reproducible. Dopamine was measured by a slightly modified method of Sourkes and Murphy12, tryptamine by the method of Sjoerdsma et al.13 and free tyramine by ethyl acetate extraction of alkaline urine, followed by paper chromatography, location, extraction of the area of paper and nitroso-naphthol fluorescence read spectrophotofluorimetrically. © 1969 Nature Publishing Group.