07 Mar 2025 (Last Modified 31 Mar 2025)

Mucuna pruriens descriptions on Reddit

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TLDR

• Discussions on Reddit about Mucuna pruriens (MP) are mainly about its use for self-treatment of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and self-diagnosis.

• Infrequent discussion of side effects or interactions with other medications, but frequent mention of the lack of regulation of herbal and dietary supplements (HDS) leading to unreliable dosing.

Introduction

• Parkinson’s Disease results from loss of dopamine-producing neurons. The main treatment is levodopa (L-DOPA).
• Approximately 60% of patients with mild or moderate Parkinson’s use herbal and dietary supplements (HDS) including Mucuna pruriens (MP), which contains 2-40% L-DOPA1.
• HDS use may interfere with physician treatment.
• Patients rarely disclose HDS use to physicians but frequently discuss HDS use for other conditions in online forums.
• We have shown online forums as a valid source of information on substance usage2,3.
• Analysis of discussions in online forums may identify reasons for HDS use and non-adherence to standard therapy

Methods

   graph TD
     A["Comments \n(n=13,612; 12,039 unique)"] --> B["Mentioning L-DOPA (n=688)"] & C["Mentioning MP (n=28)"]
    B --> D["Unique & mentioning\n direct use of L-DOPA (n=688)"]
    C --> E["Unique & mentioning\n direct use of MP (n=25)"]

Data Acquisition. Author MC wrote custom software in R and Python to extract all comments and posts from the subreddit r/Parkinson’s from the start of the subreddit to January 2025. The software is available on GitHub (requires invitation).

Data Preprocessing. We manually standardized comments, replacing brand names with generic names, expanded abbreviations, and corrected misspellings. We counted multiple identical posts by one user as one comment.

Data Analysis. Perception. We manually labelled each comment for (1) mentioning MP, (2) mentioning L-DOPA, (3) if the experience was positive, negative, neither, or both.

Perception. We manually labelled each comment for (1) mentioning MP, (2) mentioning L-DOPA, (3) if the experience was positive, negative, neither, or both.

Thematic Analysis. We conducted two rounds of qualitative analysis to identify themes in the post and then group post and comments by theme.

Results

Conclusions

Users discuss the benefits, risks, and motivations for using MP in online forums.

Users turn to Mucuna:

• To self-diagnose or self-treat while waiting to see a Parkinson’s specialist
• From dissatisfaction with pharmaceutical levodopa
• To supplement their pharmaceutical regimens for better control of symptoms

The doses discussed of L-DOPA via MP are generally lower than L-DOPA via pharmaceuticals

Many comments discuss pharmacological properties and theoretical effects, not personal use

Next Steps.

• Prospective observational cohort with testing of samples, like (Cohen et al., 2022). but with assessment of effect using Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale.

• Similar study across multiple forums

• Analysis of other compounds in MP that may potentiate L-DOPA or have disease-modifying effects

References

1. 1.Wolfrath, S. C. et al. Use of nutritional supplements in Parkinson’s disease patients. Movement Disorders: Official Journal of the Movement Disorder Society 21, 1098–1101 (2006).
2. 2.Cohen, P. A., Avula, B., Katragunta, K. & Khan, I. Levodopa content of Mucuna pruriens supplements in the NIH dietary supplement label database. JAMA neurology 79, 1085–1086 (2022).