An Introduction To Parkinson`s Disease

It may seem surprising in this day of widespread medical publicity the story of a major disease should have remained essentially untold. Yet such has been the unfortunate truth in the case of one of civilization's oldest and most disabling afflictions—the "shaking palsy" of Biblical times, the Parkinson's Disease o£ today.

Even the victims of this extraordinary disorder, whose number is estimated as high as half a million men, women, and children in the United States alone, are seldom adequately informed about the nature of their affliction or the possibility and means of its relief. And if, indeed, the patients themselves are so poorly informed, it is no wonder that the general public knows, hears, and does even less about this formidable crippler.

The traditional name, shaking palsy, is a descriptive term based upon two of its prominent symptoms: a more or less constant trembling, and palsy, or paralysis, which is actually a stiffening of the muscles. The term "shaking palsy"—not to be confused with cerebral palsy, a totally unrelated disorder—has now been generally discarded in favor of the designation Parkinson's Disease. The latter name was assigned to it in the year 1817, when Doctor James Parkinson, a London physician who was himself a victim of the condition, described its symptoms in an essay which immediately became a medical classic. Unfortunately, however, medical and popular interest stirred up by the essay was short-lived, and soon the disease, its problems, and its patients were relegated again to a neglect that, until recently, was traditional.

The explanation for this state of affairs is simple enough. So notoriously resistant to treatment was the "shaking disease" that early physicians and patients alike developed an attitude of defeatism that became a sort of trade-mark of the disorder. Persisting down through the centuries, this attitude became a fixed habit of medical thought. Attempts of any significance to find a solution to the problem failed for lack of incentive.

Another reason for its neglect is to be found in the basic trends of science. The spotlight of medical research, until recently, has been focused more upon the "dramatic" arts of surgery and the management of the acute diseases than upon the "plodding problems" of chronic disorders.

This picture, however, now shows unmistakable signs of change. For one thing, many of the fundamental problems of surgery have been solved; for another, most of the important acute diseases have been brought under some degree of control with new drugs. One result of this situation is that more people live longer and reach old age, and, when more people live longer, more of them naturally fall prey to chronic disorders. Furthermore, for reasons presently to be explained, the number of younger individuals afflicted with chronic diseases constitutes a supplement of increasing significance to this enlarging group.

Recent estimates indicate that one-fifth of the entire population of the United States are suffering from chronic diseases of one kind or another. More startling than this is another estimate: out of this group two-thirds, or about 20,000,000 people, are incapacitated for periods of one year or longer by a chronic disease. Such figures readily indicate the tremendous cost in human misery, physical, mental, and financial, occasioned by the depredations of this type of illness.

Confronted by so urgent a challenge, research scientists, in greater numbers than ever before, are turning to the problem of finding more effective remedies for chronic afflictions. To be sure, the diseases urgently requiring the attention of the all-too-few research scientists are all too many.