With your extra risk of Parkinson's post stroke, demand your competent? doctor have EXACT PREVENTION PROTOCOLS ON THIS! Nothing exact, fire that doctor and find someone competent!
Parkinson’s Disease May Have Link to Stroke March 2017
'Parkinson's Largely Is a Preventable Disease'
New book focuses on policy, pesticides, and what people can do to curb Parkinson's risk
"The Parkinson's Plan" opens with the story of two women -- Jana Reed, MD, and Sara Whittingham, MD -- one an emergency medicine physician, the other an anesthesiologist. Both were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in their mid-40s.
MedPage Today spoke with Dorsey about the changing face of Parkinson's disease and what "The Parkinson's Plan" aims to accomplish. An edited version of that discussion follows.
How does Parkinson's disease seem different now?
Dorsey: When Dr. Parkinson described the condition in 1817, he described six individuals with the disease: at least five were men, and all were over the age of 50.
The image of Parkinson's disease that's been taught -- and likely still is taught -- is that it is a disease that affects older men, and it's principally due to aging and perhaps genetics.
Jana Reed and Sara Whittingham are the new faces of Parkinson's disease. They're both women. They both served in the U.S. military. They both were in Afghanistan. They both were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in their 40s, within a month of each other.
In both cases, as we tell through the book, the likely principal cause of their Parkinson's disease is not within them, but outside of them, in their environment.
It's a chemical that very few neurologists are taught about, trichloroethylene [TCE]. This chemical and perchloroethylene [PCE], commonly used in dry cleaning, might be the most important causes of Parkinson's.
Researchers have shown increased Parkinson's risk in the Camp Lejeune study where TCE and PCE contaminated the Marine base in North Carolina. Marines who served there when they were young, in their 20s, had a 70% increased risk of developing Parkinson's 34 years later compared to Marines who served at Camp Pendleton.
TCE is everywhere. It's used to degrease metal and decaffeinate coffee. Ten million Americans worked with it. As for Sara Whittingham -- she may have not directly worked with it, but she was an aircraft maintenance officer, and her job was to oversee the cleaning and degreasing of jet engines. One of the big cleaning agents is trichloroethylene. She was likely inhaling it in the area where she was working.
What prompted this book?
Dorsey: Parkinson's largely is a preventable disease. The rise in Parkinson's disease is happening on our watch. We wrote a plan to prevent and treat the disease so future generations can be spared.
As a neurologist, I can't think of a better gift to give than a world where your disease is no longer there, or is extraordinarily rare. We've seen that with polio. We've seen that with other diseases. I think we can do that for Parkinson's.
We set goals for Parkinson's for the next 10 years: we said by 2035, we should reach goals of zero, 10, and 100. We should see zero percent growth in the incidence of Parkinson's, a 10-fold increase in research funding and the percentage spent on prevention, and 100% access to levodopa.
If you look at Parkinson's research dollars, only two pennies of every dollar are spent on trying to prevent the disease. There are houses that sell for more money than we, as a society, spend on trying to prevent Parkinson's disease.
We have not answered the bell. That's a failure of science and a failure of funding agencies.
As neurologists, our calling card is that we figure out why people get diseases. We need to figure out why people have Parkinson's disease so we can take action to prevent it and treat it most effectively.
What does "The Parkinson's Plan" recommend?
Dorsey: We give you the Parkinson's prevention pyramid: What can we do as a society? What can we do in our communities? What can we do as individuals?
The first thing is to measure the disease. What gets measured gets managed.
Parkinson's is one of the fastest-growing brain diseases in the world. If we want to prevent it, we need to first see how many people are getting it and track that over time to see if we're making progress or not. We need to find the areas of the country with high rates, with large numbers of new cases, so we can take targeted actions.
Second, we need to ban some of the most toxic chemicals. The EPA banned TCE and PCE last year. It looks like that ban is going to be put in place. In 2021, they banned chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that used to be found on over half of apples in the United States, but the manufacturer sued and the fate of that is uncertain.
We also need to ban paraquat. Over 50 countries, including China, have banned it, but the United States has not.
What else can we do?
Dorsey: We give 25 suggestions about what individuals can do to perhaps slow the rate of the disease: Wash your produce, preferably your organic produce. Avoid dry cleaners that use perchloroethylene. Use an air purifier if you live in a heavily polluted area. Add a water purifier to your home.
We also give suggestions for communities. Why are we allowing pesticides to be sprayed on kids' playgrounds and schools? Many pesticides are nerve toxins. We should find that socially unacceptable and we should take actions to address that. And golf courses -- why can't we ask golf courses to use less toxic pesticides?
We need more research to prevent and slow Parkinson's. There are studies that suggest that among people with Parkinson's disease, those exposed to high levels of air pollution are at greater risk for being hospitalized. There are studies that show exercise as a potential way to slow the rate of progression of the disease.
Some studies have robust evidence, some have very limited evidence -- but we're not even studying many of the most important questions out there.
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