As well as RLS, dopamine agonist drugs are used to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s, pituitary gland tumours and some mental health conditions.<\/p>\n
Alan was prescribed pramipexole in 2005 and his behaviour dramatically changed soon after, according to his family. <\/p>\n
He became addicted to sugar and could eat up to 60 choc ices in a week. As well as losing nearly all of his teeth, he also lost his inhibitions.<\/p>\n
“His libido was off the scale, which was incredibly embarrassing,” David said. <\/p>\n
“It was uncomfortable at mealtimes, he was always talking about sex and making inappropriate comments. It was really difficult for the family. <\/p>\n
“I really didn’t like him at all, I just thought he’d turned into a dirty old man. He lost all of his friends, luckily I never told him to his face that I didn’t like him.”<\/p>\n
Alan went from being “tight-fisted” to investing in high-risk stocks and got involved in spread betting. It is estimated he lost about \u00a3350,000 over five years.<\/p>\n
David, 45, did not think the changes were linked to anything and tried to ignore them, but made the decision to keep his two young children away from their grandfather.<\/p>\n
“If we spoke to him about any of it, his answer was always, ‘I’ll die happy’.”<\/p>\n
In 2007, Alan’s medication was changed to ropinirole, which is also one of the medications in the dopamine agonists family. <\/p>\n
His dosage was increased three times overall, which made his RLS worse.<\/p>\n
Alan’s compulsions and hyper-sexuality continued until his death from heart failure in 2023 aged 77, his family said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As well as RLS, dopamine agonist drugs are used to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s, pituitary gland tumours…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[163,85,46,522,523],"class_list":["post-485998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}