Parkinson’s disease: New Hope for a Hopeless Prognosis

Some diseases are more discouraging than others - for doctors as well as patients. Parkinson’s disease is one of these. No matter what medicine tries to do, the disease ravages the patient’s body year after year. Most people do not contract the disease until late in life. About 1% of the population including Michael J. Fox contract it earlier in life.

Like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s is a form of dementia. A simple explanation of Parkinson’s is that nerve cells in part of the brain (substantia nigra) stop producing a communication chemical (dopamine) for another part of the brain (the basal ganglia). The loss to this area interferes with the smooth movement between mental and physical tasks as well as starting and stopping movements. An analogy might be if the fluid was low in the transmission of your car. Movements would be less smooth and more abrupt or jerky. Hence the tremors of Parkinson’s.

One risk factor for developing this disease is genetics. Science is scrambling for treatment of dementia related diseases as Baby Boomers age. A gene called ApoE4 has been associated with Alzheimer’s. It is important to remember that having a genetic predisposition to a disease does not predetermine your fate. If, for example, you have a gene, which causes you to have a massive hangover, every time you drink alcohol, you needn’t ever have a hangover. You must drink alcohol to have the gene express itself.

Lab rats who had their basal ganglia intentionally knocked out, mimicking Parkinson’s, were shown to develop new nerve connections in that structure when they were allowed to exercise.

But it gets better! In the past 10 years, exercise has been prescribed more and more as treatment early on in diseases of dementia. Exercise calls into action the motor area of the brain, which degenerates in Parkinson’s (the basal ganglia).

One study looked at the effects of using exercise in combination with L-dopa, the drug commonly prescribed for Parkinson’s. Doing forty minutes of easy stationary cycling immediately before taking L-dopa improved the effectiveness of the medicine on motor function. This addition is not an expensive therapy and it has only beneficial side effects!

A study in Finland followed 1500 people from the 1970’s. Twenty-one years later when they were between 65 and 79 years of age, those who exercised at least twice per week, were 50% less likely to have dementia. Again, comparing the cost and simplicity of exercise with the cost both financially and emotionally of early onset dementia is, if you’ll pardon my pun, a no brainer.