More than a million Americans live with Parkinson’s disease and nearly 60,000 new diagnoses are made each year.
According to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, the dollar costs are high.
Treatment expenses and other related financial factors – including lost income from those afflicted with the disease and those who help care for them – are estimated at more than $25 billion a year.
The emotional cost can be even higher.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes cites tremors or trembling of the hands, arms, legs, jaw and face along with stiffness of limbs, slowness of movement and impaired balance and coordination as the most common symptoms of Parkinson’s.
As the disease progresses, those symptoms become more pronounced and can eventually become life-threatening – leading to falls, difficulty in swallowing and pneumonia.
Parkinson’s patients are four times more likely to contract and die from pneumonia than the population at large, and 70 percent of all Parkinson’s related deaths are attributed to aspiration pneumonia.
According to the Mayo Clinic, Parkinson’s causes certain nerve cells or neurons in the brain to break down so they are no longer able to produce the chemical neurotransmitter known as dopamine. When dopamine levels decrease, the brain is no longer able to control a wide variety of functions resulting in those tremors along with balance and swallowing problems.
And the emotional toll?
The National Parkinson’s Foundation reports that over 60 percent of those diagnosed with Parkinson’s also develop moderate to severe depression. The sheer frustration of no longer being able to perform simple tasks feeds that depression, and it can be just as bad for caretakers.
As Bruce McEvoy of the Indian River County Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Association pointed out in an interview last year, “65 percent of Parkinson’s caretakers die before the patient does.”
The Parkinson’s story is not all doom and gloom, though.
Dr. Neetu Dhadwal, a board-certified neurologist with the Sebastian River Medical Center who served a clinical neurophysiology fellowship at Manhattan’s famed Mt. Sinai hospital, says there is a great deal of help available for those who seek it.
“We actually understand more about Parkinson’s disease than many other forms of neurologic disease,” Dhadwal says. “We know the etiology and what part of the brain is affected. We [can enable] quite a significant improvement in quality of life and symptom control with medications.
“A lot of the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are amenable to medications [and] we can help modify a lot of the non-motor symptoms, too.”
“I think the biggest problem for us is early detection of the disease and finding a point where we can intervene earlier,” says Dr. Dhadwal.
“There are currently no blood or laboratory tests that have been proven to help detect the presence of Parkinson’s disease” before it becomes symptomatic, according to the National Institutes of Health, but once the disease is diagnosed, drugs such as Levadopa and Carbidopa help control symptoms.
Research is turning up additional medications that show promise.
A 2015 study from the Harvard medical school and the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore seems to show a decades-old anti-malarial drug, Chloroquine, might have the ability to protect the brain’s nerve cells, allowing them to continue producing dopamine despite the presence of Parkinson’s but by the study’s own admission, more extensive research is still needed.
Also in 2015, a drug called Tasigna originally approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of leukemia showed “significant and encouraging changes in toxic proteins in the brain linked to the progression of Parkinson’s,” according to a study presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago.
Any disease affecting the brain can be exhausting and frustrating for patients and family members but Dhadwal points out that, “With Alzheimer’s we can’t really improve the brain functioning but with Parkinson’s we can control [most] motor symptoms.”
“We now have medications that intensify the dopamine you have available so although [the disease] is not curable, it is definitely treatable.”
Dr. Neetu Dhadwal is at 13855 U.S. Hwy. 1, Suite 4 in Sebastian. The phone number is 772-581-8247.