Hey all, my dad was diagnosed with parkinson's roughly 10 years ago, about a year ago he started having unresponsive episodes like those described in this thread.
During these episodes he has no response to external stimuli, and comes out of it without remembering anything and seems fine and back to baseline.
After many trips to the ER and seeing several neurologists who just upped his carbidopa/levodopa or told him to get better sleep we got a diagnosis. We were told that my dad likely has Lewy Body Dementia and that these episodes are not uncommon for people with progressing LBD. The neurologist just referred to them as "lewy body spells".
Unfortunately, there is no clear cut treatment for this and they only thing that can be done is make sure their vitals are normal and wait it out.
Some things that I noticed that might help anyone who is going through this:
- Carbidopa/Levodopa and other dopamine treatments can cause cognition or episodes to be much worse. We were told that minimum dose of carbidopa/levodopa to manage the parkinsons symptoms would help with the hallucinations/cognition
- Pramipexole would immediately cause my dad to have an episode.
- Some antipsychotics can cause severe adverse effects in people with LBD