Parkinson's Disease

By Lizabeth Craig

The youngest recorded case of Parkinson's disease was a 12-year-old patient, though the average age is around 56. With 50,000 cases a year, awareness of this disease is essential. There is now known cause of Parkinson's Disease, but there is a link between it and depression. Readers will explore this disease, learning about details in the search for answers, treatment, and what life is like when living with this disease.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosen Publishing
• Release date: Jan 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781420512281

Book preview

Foreword

Introduction - The Shaking Palsy

Chapter 1 - What Is Parkinson’s Disease?

Chapter 2 - Causes and Symptoms

Chapter 3 - Diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease

Chapter 4 - Treating Parkinson’s Disease

Chapter 5 - Living with Parkinson’s Disease

Chapter 6 - The Future of Parkinson’s Disease

Notes

Glossary

Organizations to Contact

For More Information

Index

Picture Credits

About the Author

© 2015 Gale, Cengage Learning

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Craig, Lizabeth.

Parkinson's disease / by Lizabeth Craig. pages cm. -- (Diseases & disorders)

Summary: This title in Lucent's Diseases and Disorders series focuses on Parkinson's Disease. The book describes how the disease is contracted, its symptoms, and treatments. It also discusses the issues that caregivers face-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4205-1227-4 (hardback)

1. Parkinson's disease. I. Title.

RC382.C913 2015 616.8’33--dc23

2014033542

Lucent Books

27500 Drake Rd. 

Farmington Hills, MI 48331

ISBN-13: 978-1-4205-1227-4

ISBN-10: 1-4205-1227-7

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 19 18 17 16 15

Foreword

Introduction

The Shaking Palsy

Chapter 1

What Is Parkinson’s Disease?

Chapter 2

Causes and Symptoms

Chapter 3

Diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease

Chapter 4

Treating Parkinson’s Disease

Chapter 5

Living with Parkinson’s Disease

Chapter 6

The Future of Parkinson’s Disease

Notes

Glossary

Organizations to Contact

For More Information

Index

Picture Credits

About the Author

Charles Best, one of the pioneers in the search for a cure for diabetes, once explained what it is about medical research that intrigued him so. It’s not just the gratification of knowing one is helping people, he confided, although that probably is a more heroic and selfless motivation. Those feelings may enter in, but truly, what I find best is the feeling of going toe to toe with nature, of trying to solve the most difficult puzzles ever devised. The answers are there somewhere, those keys that will solve the puzzle and make the patient well. But how will those keys be found?

Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has so puzzled people— and often frightened them, as well—as the onset of illness in a body or mind that had seemed healthy before. A seizure, the inability of a heart to pump, the sudden deterioration of muscle tone in a small child—being unable to reverse such conditions or even to understand why they occur was unspeakably frustrating to healers. Even before there were names for such conditions, even before they were understood at all, each was a reminder of how complex the human body was, and how vulnerable.

While our grappling with understanding diseases has been frustrating at times, it has also provided some of humankind’s most heroic accomplishments. Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery in 1928 of a mold that could be turned into penicillin has resulted in the saving of untold millions of lives. The isolation of the enzyme insulin has reversed what was once a death sentence for anyone with diabetes. There have been great strides in combating conditions for which there is not yet a cure, too. Medicines can help AIDS patients live longer, diagnostic tools such as mammography and ultrasounds can help doctors find tumors while they are treatable, and laser surgery techniques have made the most intricate, minute operations routine.

This toe-to-toe competition with diseases and disorders is even more remarkable when seen in a historical continuum. An astonishing amount of progress has been made in a very short time. Just two hundred years ago, the existence of germs as a cause of some diseases was unknown. In fact, it was less than 150 years ago that a British surgeon named Joseph Lister had difficulty persuading his fellow doctors that washing their hands before delivering a baby might increase the chances of a healthy delivery (especially if they had just attended to a diseased patient)!

Each book in Lucent’s Diseases and Disorders series explores a disease or disorder and the knowledge that has been accumulated (or discarded) by doctors through the years. Each book also examines the tools used for pinpointing a diagnosis, as well as the various means that are used to treat or cure a disease. Finally, new ideas are presented—techniques or medicines that may be on the horizon.

Frustration and disappointment are still part of medicine, for not every disease or condition can be cured or prevented. But the limitations of knowledge are being pushed outward constantly; the most difficult puzzles ever devised are finding challengers every day.

T

he year 1794 was a chaotic time of political reform and change in England. The people were very unhappy with the way their government was treating them. On top of that, the king himself was battling bouts of mental illness. Adding to his many headaches was the appearance of a series of pamphlets calling for political and social reforms, written by an unknown person who called himself simply Old Hubert. Later that year several members of a secret political group in London were brought before the government to answer charges of plotting to assassinate the king. Nicknamed the Pop Gun Plot, its goal had been to use a poisoned dart from an air gun to end the king’s reign early. One of the men called to testify was a surgeon and scientist named James Parkinson. Under intense questioning, he finally admitted to being the mysterious Old Hubert.

Fortunately for Parkinson, the Pop Gun Plot was soon forgotten, and no charges were filed against him. Even so, he gave up his political activities and turned his attention back to health and medicine. In the early 1800s one of his many interests centered on his observations of people with a disorder commonly called the shaking palsy. Parkinson observed six sufferers of this malady (several of whom he simply met at random on the street) and wrote about their symptoms. In his 1817 work, An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, Parkinson described tremors of the hands and legs, a stooped-over posture, muscle rigidity, and a shuffling kind of gait while walking. At the time, the essay received little attention. By the end of the century, however, the shaking palsy would have a new name.

An Ancient Malady

The signs and symptoms of the shaking palsy, which today is called Parkinson’s disease (or PD for short), had been known for a very long time. As far back as 5000 B.C ., a medical text from ancient East Indian Ayurvedic medicine described symptoms of a shaking illness called Kampavata. Kampavata was treated with a tropical bean-like plant called Mucuna pru-riens, or velvet bean, which contains a chemical very similar to levodopa—the most common modern drug used to treat PD. Preparations of velvet bean are still used in some parts of the world to treat symptoms of PD.

The earliest known Chinese medical document, the twenty-five-hundred-year-old Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen, includes a description of a PD-like illness. In the eighth-century B.c . Greek epic poem the Iliad, elderly King Nestor laments that he can no longer participate in competitions: My limbs are no longer steady, dear friend; nor my feet, neither do my arms, as they once did, swing light from my shoulders.¹ The Greek physician Erasistratus of Ceos (310-250 B.C .) wrote of a kind of paralysis that he called paradoxos, in which a person stops walking and cannot seem to start again, a common sign of PD. One of the most famous of ancient Greek physicians, Galen ( a.d. 129-200), wrote extensively about motor disorders, including tremors of the hands when at rest, muscle rigidity, and inability to control movements in the elderly—all signs of PD. He is credited with coining the term shaking palsy to refer to these symptoms. The term was used to refer to the disease for the next seventeen hundred years.

Second-century a.d. Greek physician Galen wrote about motor disorders, hand tremors, and the inability to control muscle movements as the shaking palsy. He may have been describing Parkinson's disease.

Descriptions of PD-like disorders appear in many writings all throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (from about 450 to 1550). One of history’s most famous medieval physicians was Ibn Sina of Persia, also known as Avicenna (980-1037). His great medical work, The Canon of Medicine, includes extensive coverage of movement and nervous disorders, including various treatments. In the late fifteenth century, the Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci