Seminario " Dancing with the devil. Reward-seeking behaviors in Parkinson's disease"

minority of the patients, while the majority is somehow protected from this adverse effect. While it

seems clear that men with early-onset PD are more vulnerable, other predisposing factors, such as

various current or pre-PD personality traits are a matter of debate. In terms of neurophysiological

advances, one may find striking analogies to the addiction literature suggesting a causal chain beginning

with certain predisposing conditions of striatal dopamine synapses, an "unnatural" increase of dopamine

stimulation and a characteristic pattern of resulting functional changes in remote networks of appetitive

drive and impulse control. Future prospects include potential add-on medications and the possible

identification of genetic predispositions at a genome-wide scale. Functional imaging of pharmacogenetic

interactions (imaging pharmaco-genomics) may be an important tool on that road.