Parkinson

I sat in an uncomfortable flower-print chair in my neurologist's office. The nurses in the front office were talking to each other about what type of sandwich they would order for lunch. The background was filled with traces of annoying soft-rock music and an overpowering smell of coffee. It was apparent that someone put much effort into creating a calm and relaxing environment, but at the moment it felt as irritating as wearing an itchy sweater in the desert. Hearing the diagnosis — "You have Parkinson's disease.

Lizette Salas heard the cheers in the gallery and the shouts of "Fight On," coming from fans who knew her from her USC days. The 23-year-old from Azusa, who learned golf from her father Ramon, a mechanic at the Azusa Greens Country Club, is in second place, one shot behind leader Inbee Park after two rounds of the Kraft Nabisco Championship at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage. Salas shot a four-under-par 68 Friday that gave her a two-day total of six-under 138. Park, born in South Korea and now a resident of Murrieta, had a round of 67 that included six birdies and one bogey to put her at 137. Michelle Wie, who shot a 70 Friday, Paula Creamer, Cristie Kerr and Jessica Korda were part of a nine-way tie for 12th at two under and are the next-highest American golfers behind Salas.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday cautioned that it is investigating the possibility that the combination Parkinson's drug Stalevo may increase the risk of heart attack, stroke and death in elderly patients who are taking it. The agency urged patients not to stop taking the drug, but warned them to let their physicians know if the patients have risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Stalevo, sold by Novartis, is a combination of three drugs: carbidopa, levodopa and entacapone.

Booth Gardner, a two-term Democratic governor who later in life spearheaded a campaign that made Washington the second state in the nation to legalize assisted suicide for the terminally ill, has died after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. He was 76. Gardner died Friday at his Tacoma home, said family spokesman Ron Dotzauer. The millionaire heir to the Weyerhaeuser timber fortune served as the state's 19th governor from 1985 to 1993 following terms as Pierce County executive, state senator and business school dean.

Parkinson's disease is most often associated with the uncontrolled tremors seen in patients when they try to walk or eat. There's no cure, but some patients say a new exercise therapy has improved their agility. This South Florida Sun Sentinel story explains the routine: "The treatment emphasizes big, repetitive motions and operatic voice exercises to help patients speak louder, correct their posture and walk with agility instead of taking baby steps. " 'I look much different from last year,' said Rabbi Merle Singer, 71, retired from Temple Beth El of Boca Raton.

Taking ibuprofen regularly may lower the risk of developing Parkinson's disease by about a third, perhaps by reducing the inflammation that is thought to contribute to the onset of the disease, Harvard University researchers reported this week. Surprisingly, however, other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) that also reduce inflammation have no effect on the disease, they reported online in the journal Neurology. Dr. Alberto Ascherio and Dr. Xiang Gao of Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and their colleagues studied 98,892 women in the Nurses' Health Study and 37,305 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, two well-established, ongoing programs.

A six-month program of Tai Chi exercises helped people with various stages of Parkinson's disease improve stability, their ability to walk and reduced the frequency of falls. A study released this week in the New England Journal of Medicine compared a six-month tailored Tai Chi program to resistance training and stretching to see which was most effective at improving functional movement, walking and balance for Parkinson's patients. Researchers randomly assigned 195 men and women ages 40 to 85 who were in stages one to four of Parkinson's disease (on a scale of one to five)

Parkinson's disease patients have double the risk of developing potentially lethal melanoma, government researchers reported Tuesday. Researchers have long suspected such a link, but the new study, reported in the journal Neurology, provides the strongest evidence to date. Researchers are at a loss to explain how the link occurs biologically, but they suspect it may be a combination of environmental exposure and genetic predisposition. The association is particularly strange, experts said, because Parkinson's patients, in general, have a below-normal risk of developing most types of cancer.

The cause of Parkinson's disease remains unknown, but a recent report identifies pollutants in some urban areas that may increase the risk of getting the disease. The Health Notes blog of the Newport News Daily Press reports on a new analysis that identifies high levels of manganese and copper pollution as potential risk factors for some city dwellers. For example, people living in areas with higher levels of manganese pollution had a 78% greater risk of having Parkinson's than those who didn't, according to the Washington University in St. Louis report . Prior research on Parkinson's disease in rural and farm areas links the disease to private well water and exposure to pesticides.

Low-intensity walking may help people with Parkinson's disease improve their gait and mobility, a new study finds. The study, presented Tuesday at the American Academy of Neurology's annual meeting in Honolulu, compared three different forms of exercise to see which was most beneficial to men and women with Parkinson's disease, which affects motor control. Researchers randomly assigned 67 people with the disease to one of three programs: a low-intensity treadmill walk for 50 minutes; a high-intensity treadmill walk for 30 minutes; and a weight and stretching regimen that included leg presses, extensions and curls.

NEW YORK --Los Angeles-based designer Gregory Parkinson showed his fall 2013 collection in a presentation format during New York Fashion Week, at the bohemian chic NoMad Hotel not far from the Flatiron District. Looking at the clothes set up in the hotel's Beaux Arts-style salon, it was easy to imagine the mannequins coming to life and sipping Champagne with fancy guests. The look: Tea-length skirts worn with cropped blouses or camisoles, and dresses with evening jackets, all in the loveliest layers and tiers of hand-dyed lace in saturated hues of plum, teal, pink, navy blue and black.

In a small but hopeful step for researchers working on therapies to treat Parkinson's disease, a team in Japan has used stem cells harvested from bone marrow to restore function in monkeys with the debilitating condition. The cell transplants didn't cure the macaques, but did improve motor skills in the animals and appeared to do so safely, the scientists wrote Monday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation - suggesting that stem cells from bone marrow might someday be a useful source for treatments of Parkinson's in humans.

Inside the human skull lies a 3-pound mystery. The brain - a command center composed of tens of billions of branching neurons - controls who we are, what we do and how we feel. "It's the most amazing information structure anybody has ever been able to imagine," says Dr. Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md. For centuries, the brain's inner workings remained largely unexplored. But all that is changing.

Nearly 20 years removed from the White House, former President George H.W. Bush, accompanied by his wife, Barbara, sat down for an interview with Parade Magazine . Praising two out of his three presidential successors, Bush saved his critiques for anti-tax ringleader Grover Norquist. Bush, whose campaign for reelection in 1992 was severely damaged by his failure to live up to his pledge “no new taxes,” was asked how he felt about that same pledge becoming the calling card for the current class of Republicans.

This post has been corrected. See note at the bottom for details. Who hasn't heard of mad cow disease? Maybe there are a lot more diseases like that than we recognize -- such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's  -- that are caused by a rogue, mis-folded piece of protein that seeds other bits of protein to mis-fold as well. So argues Stanley Prusiner, a UC San Francisco professor, in a commentary in the journal Science. Prusiner won a Nobel Prize for finding that a class of neurodegenerative diseases (of which mad cow is one)

  In writer-director David Fenster's new film “Pincus,” which had its world premiere as part of the narrative competition at this year's Los Angeles Film Festival, a young man tries to navigate through his own life while also caring for his father, debilitated by Parkinson's. The movie stars Fenster's former CalArts classmate David Nordstrom, as well as the filmmaker's own father, Paul Fenster, who has been living with Parkinson's for 13 years. In the film's own lyric, delicate way, the character played by Nordstrom - who also starred in Fenster's 2004 road movie “Trona” and had his own film “Sawdust City” at LAFF last year - seems to be on something of a collision course with himself.

Almost a decade has passed since the FDA approved an electronic "pacemaker" device to control the tremors, rigidity and abnormal gait that come with Parkinson's disease, and some 70,000 patients have had surgery to implant it deep in their brains. With that, a clearer picture is emerging of who benefits most from the procedure, what its risks are, and how deep brain stimulation  stacks up against an older surgical procedure in relieving Parkinson's symptoms. Parkinson's patients most likely to improve with deep-brain stimulation are younger, initially responded well to the drug levodopa , have physical disability but few cognitive or psychiatric symptoms, and get their pacemakers programmed by a highly trained technician, according to an expert panel of Parkinson's disease specialists.

A drug that could halt the progression of Parkinson's disease is successful in mice and is now being evaluated in human patients, researchers reported this week.   The drug is phenylbutyrate, which is already on the market as an orphan drug for treatment of infants with a rare genetic disorder called urea cycle disorder . Research at the University of Colorado School of Medicine shows that the medication turns on a gene that can protect dopamine neurons. It's the destruction of nerve cells that produce dopamine that leads to the stymptoms of Parkinson's disease, such as loss of movement.

The Austrian company AFFiRiS A.G. of Vienna said this week it has begun the first-ever clinical trials of a vaccine to treat Parkinson's disease. The study of as many as 32 patients is designed to test the safety and tolerability of the vaccine, called PD01A. Parkinson's is thought to result from the deposit of pathological forms of a protein called alpha-synuclein in the brain, causing the death of cells, particularly in the region known as the substantia nigra. The accumulation of alpha-synuclein disrupts the production of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain, impairing movement and causing tremors.