Website ontwerp:

H van der Avoort.

Faundation for children
with serious lack of development
because of DOPAMINE shortage

The Dr. De Rijk Syndrome, or tyrosine hydroxylase deficiency is a metabolic disease from the brain.

The symptons are:

• In the beginning an apperent normal development, that doesn't continue.
• Striking lack of motion
• Mask face
• Children become stiff in arms and legs, and weak in the body, so there are often wrong in thinking of spasticity
• Children are easily irritable.
• Intellectual development seems to be relatively good, together with bad motoric development.
• Speaking development does not start at all, or badly.
• Sometimes sputum flood.
• Pregnancy and birth doesn't give explanation for the given problems.

They found a number of young children, aged 11 to 38 months, with a till then unknown reason for their serious lack lack of development. That was in the St. Ignatius Hospital in Breda, Holland, where Dr. De Rijk-van Andel is working as a pediatric neurologist. Serious research of blood, urine, and brain didn't give reasonable explanation for this. In the end they found a lack of dopamine in the cerebral liquid, that was obtained via a dorsal injection. The liquor was examined in the Academic Hospital in Nijmegen. Dopamine is a so called neurotransmitter, a messenger substantion that takes care of the transport of cerebral stimuli to arm and leg muscles. The children could be treated with dopamine, already for sale for Parkinson's patients. In the case of Parkinson's disease, usually threatening older people, there is a too low production of dopamine in the obsolating brain. Soon after starting of treatment, development of the children changed in a good direction. Dopamine should be fabricated from the amino acids in the food. This fabrication seems to be disorted at these children.

It is suggested that there could be a problem in the enzym fabricating dopamine. This is called tyrosine hydroxylase. There are still unable to measure the enzym in laboratory. The ill-function of the enzym seems to be on inheritable base. There is research for that now.