"Where Life Meets Parkinson's." A blog for Parkinson's education, research advances, treatment strategies, and personal reflection. The goal is to provide support and resources to anyone either with Parkinson's disease or with any neurodegenerative disorder.
"Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible." William Sloane Coffin "Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone, you'll never walk alone." Oscar Hammerstein II Introduction: I have been trying to learn more about brain physiology and the inner workings as it relates to …
Continue reading "Basal Ganglia, Nigrostriatal Pathway and Parkinson’s"
"Your life is a work of art that you will work on the rest of your life." Richard Blanco "Today is the first day of the rest of your life, and if you screw that up, you can start again tomorrow." Ingrid Weir A Not So Typical "Anniversary" Blog Post:Six years ago this week, I …
Continue reading "A Parkinson’s Diagnosis: You Still Control Your Life"
"Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life." Golda Meir "Start where you are, use what you have." Arthur Ashe Introduction: Within 24 hours of arriving in Kyoto, Japan for the World Parkinson Congress (June 2019), I was asked by several people, "How did I …
Continue reading "The Practical Matter of Carrying Medication for Treating Parkinson’s"
"In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain." Pliny the Elder "Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." Jacob Bronowski Précis: There are many motor and non-symptoms in Parkinson's, which gives us our own individual expression pattern of this chronic neurodegenerative disease. A common thread we share is linked …
"It is foolish to pluck out one's hair for sorrow, as if grief could be assuaged by baldness." Marcus Tullius Cicero "Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man - there's your diamond in the rough." Larry David Introduction: When you play golf, they frequently pair you up …
Continue reading "Brief Report: Hair Loss Linked to Dopamine Agonists"
"Symbiosis is a much higher reflection of intelligent life." Frederick Lenz "Why do we do basic research? To learn about ourselves." Walter Gilbert Overview: Reading the article entitled "Discovery and inhibition of an interspecies gut bacterial pathway for Levodopa metabolism" from V. Maini Rekdal et al., Science 364, eaau6323 (2019) (DOI: 10.1126/science.aau6323- open access) made …
Continue reading "Human Gut Microbes Identified That Process Levodopa"
"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." Isaac Asimov “Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.” Sir William Osler Introduction: For the following reasons, I would like to introduce and …
Continue reading "Journey with Parkinson’s: Brief Reports on Current Research/Issues"
"Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don't want to be where you are. Here, Now." Eckhart Tolle "Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse." Alexander Pushkin Introduction: In the latest issue of Neurology (June, 2018), Dr. Corvol and collaborators in Paris, France, present the results of a long-term …
Continue reading "Dopamine Agonists and Impulse Control Disorders in Parkinson’s"
"Some remedies are worse than the disease." Publilius Syrus "Each patient carries his own doctor inside him." Norman Cousins Summary: Dopamine agonists are widely used in the treatment of Parkinson's, especially as a first-line therapy. Some patients on a dopamine agonist experience side-effects that require either tapering or discontinuation of the drug. First described in …
Continue reading "Dopamine Agonist Withdrawal Syndrome (DAWS) in Parkinson’s"
"The excitement of vitamins, nutrition and metabolism permeated the environment." Paul D. Boyer "A substance that makes you ill if you don't eat it." Albert Szent-Gyorgy Introduction: Claire McLean, an amazing-PT who is vital to my life managing my Parkinson's, posted a very interesting article about the generation of homocysteine from the metabolism of levodopa …
