First, here’s a terrific video interview with Dr. Michael Okun about how we need to start changing the way we view Parkinson’s disease.  Dr. Sanjay Gupta asks Dr. Okun about his research into PD, and comes up with these items:

• PD is not a disease that’s just about dopamine.
• It’s not just a brain disease; you can see it also in the gut, on the skin, and elsewhere.
• Although dopamine replacement pills help control the symptoms for many people, unfortunately they are not available in many countries around the world.
• PD can be considered a global pandemic, even though it’s not increasing at the same rate in every country.
• PD is expanding globally faster than Alzheimer’s disease.
• People contract PD through various ways.  They can get it through the air from pollution that they breathe, or from their gut thanks to polluted water and insecticides on food.
• Cluster cases occur, whereby people living, say, next to the same golf course come down with PD.  Dr. Okun cites as factual that Michael J. Fox was part of a cluster case, when many people who worked with him in Canada on the same film all developed Parkinson’s.

In the interview, Dr. Okun discusses another famous researcher who went on to develop Parkinson’s himself.  I’ll paste some of the article about him below, with a link to the entire piece.

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And here is the beginning of print article that the video brings up.  To read the entire thing, click here.

Twist of fate

A physician-scientist has probed Parkinson’s disease for more than 30 years. Now, he has it

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Tim Greenamyre, a neuroscientist and physician who directs the Pittsburgh Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), began to notice unsettling symptoms in his own body. He couldn’t smell things. He was constipated. He was shouting and kicking in his sleep. His left arm didn’t swing when he walked.

In July 2021, Greenamyre turned to a neurologist colleague to confirm the diagnosis he already suspected. He had Parkinson’s disease, an illness he has devoted himself to treating and trying to cure. Over the course of his long and productive career, the 67-year-old has not only won the admiration of his patients and clinical colleagues, but also developed a widely used animal model of Parkinson’s and contributed key insights into environmental triggers. That work exposed him to chemicals that induce the disease in rodents, a possible factor in his own illness.

“The irony is obvious,” says Greenamyre, a shy man with a dry sense of humor and a penchant for practical jokes who, to the unpracticed eye, shows few if any signs of the disease. (For now, he says, medication is helping.)