Dopamine pump treatment offers life-changing impact for patient
Dopamine pump treatment offers life-changing impact for patient
By Sean Gorman
Kellie Dalton hasn’t been consistent over the years in taking the pills prescribed to control her Parkinson’s symptoms.
Those pills boost her dopamine, a neurotransmitter produced in the brain that’s crucial to motor control. People with Parkinson’s have far lower levels of dopamine that contribute to the kinds of symptoms Dalton first started experiencing more than a decade ago.
For example, she couldn’t use her right hand to wave. She also couldn’t use her right foot to operate her riding lawn mower, and her right arm had curled in. But she found the pill regimen onerous, and the medicine made her feel sick.
“I would take my morning medication, but I wouldn’t always take the afternoon or evening medication,” says Dalton, 54, of Burkeville, Virginia. “They made me feel really nauseous, so I didn’t want to take them. They made me feel worse than the Parkinson’s did.”
With her inconsistent record taking her pills, Dalton was a good candidate for a newly approved pump that can consistently regulate dopamine levels — and lessen symptoms. For Dalton, the device has had a life-changing impact.
A “game-changer”
Dalton is among the roughly half-dozen patients at the VCU Parkinson’s and Movement Disorder Center who are using the VYALEV pump that the Food and Drug Administration approved in October 2024.
The VYALEV device administers Levodopa — a drug that converts into dopamine after it makes its way into a patient’s brain — following a skin infusion. Leslie Cloud, M.D., director of the PMDC’s Parkinson’s Disease Program, says the pump offers doctors a valuable tool for alleviating a patient’s symptoms.
“It’s going to be a game-changer for a lot of people,” Cloud says. “We already have some experience using it at the center, and that experience has been overwhelmingly positive.”
For decades, doctors have used various means of delivering Levodopa into Parkinson’s patients whose dopamine producing brain cells have died off.
“If you think of your body as an automobile, dopamine is the gas pedal,” Cloud explains. “It’s what enables you to move successfully.”
Parkinson’s patients have long taken the drug orally or by inhaling it, but those approaches have resulted in fluctuating dopamine levels as the drug dissipates in the body, Cloud explains.
“Therefore, their symptoms are on a roller coaster around the clock too,” she adds.
But the VYALEV pump offers 24 hours of stable dopamine levels as Levodopa is infused through the skin around the clock, she adds.
“It provides better, more consistent symptom control, and it does that without having to undergo any kind of surgery,” Cloud says.
That skin infusion pump treatment has actually been widely available in Europe and other parts of the world for more than a decade, but only recently in the U.S., Cloud notes.
Prior to the newly approved skin infusion pump, a previous pump treatment had been used to boost a patient’s dopamine levels. But that older pump device had a much more invasive delivery system requiring surgery to insert tubing into the small bowel. Cloud says it came with its share of complications and wasn’t effective or popular.
The VYALEV skin pump, on the other hand, is typically worn in a fanny pack with the skin infusions typically done on the abdomen. The makers of VYALEV say the device weighs less than a pound and is about the size of two cell phones stacked on top of each other.
A key benefit of the skin infusion pump is it can control a patient’s overnight symptoms, allowing them to sleep, Cloud notes. Just having a restful night without waking up can have a direct positive impact on their symptoms, she adds.
“It’s been a miracle”
During a doctor’s visit with Dr. Cloud around the start of this year, Dalton asked if there was a pump option to consistently deliver her medicine.
“She was like, ‘This was just approved,’” Dalton says. “Dr. Cloud got the ball rolling.”
Dalton explains her device is kind of like a diabetic’s insulin pump that administers medicine through injections on the skin of her stomach. And it didn’t take long to see an impact.
Dalton chokes back tears recalling what her son, who was 15 when she was diagnosed 10 years ago, said about her just a month into using the pump.
“We were standing in the kitchen — and this always kind of makes me cry telling this story,” Dalton says. “He says, ‘she’s the mom I used to have before Parkinson’s. She looks like she used to when I was a teenager.’”
Dalton’s face, once expressionless from Parkinson’s, is softer and has begun to move again. She talks using her hands nowadays — like she did before her symptoms started. She no longer scrawls her signature.
“When I used to try to sign my name, I couldn’t do it,” she says. “I can write my name now. It looks pretty again. It’s been a miracle.”
Dalton’s mom, a nurse who moved to Virginia to help take care of her, passed away in February shortly before she started using the pump.
“She would be so excited to see how well I’m doing,” Dalton adds.
Dalton says life with the pump comes with some challenges. It’s not particularly heavy, but she says it is bulky, likening its size to an old Walkman cassette player that she wears under her clothing throughout the day. And she’s had skin infections at injection sites on her abdomen.
But even with those tradeoffs, she doesn’t want to go without using it. “
My life is 100 times better,” she says. “I know I still have Parkinson’s. There are some things I just can’t physically do. But there are so many more things I can do now that, three months ago, I couldn’t do.”
Last October, before she started using the pump, she went to a Taylor Swift concert in Miami with her daughter-in-law but couldn’t sing.
Things are different now.
“I was playing Taylor Swift the other day cleaning the house,” she says. “I was singing at the top of my lungs.”