Documented as early as the 12th Century B.C. in Ancient Egypt, Parkinson’s disease (PD) was first extensively medically described in 1817 by English surgeon James Parkinson.
More than two centuries later, this progressive neurological disorder of the brain now affects more than 17,500 people in British Columbia and about 100,000 people across Canada.
As April marks Parkinson’s Awareness Month internationally, this time of the year presents a chance to educate the public about this incurable disease, which is projected to double globally by 2040.
Parkinson’s disease and its symptoms
Parkinson’s occurs when dopamine-producing cells in the brain deteriorate. Dopamine, an important neurotransmitter for nervous system functions, is responsible for regulating movements and emotions. The exact cause for the death of these cells remains unclear.
Individuals diagnosed with PD might exhibit common motor symptoms including tremors (shaking), slowness of movement, muscle stiffness, and impaired balance. Other less visible and non-motor symptoms frequently observed are fatigue, speaking difficulties, sleep disorders, and cognitive changes among other things. Some have also reported losing their sense of smell.
Despite the common symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease, each individual’s experience varies greatly, with unique symptoms and requirements.
Researchers believe that Parkinson’s is likely caused by genetic and environmental factors. However, there’s still no clear understanding of what triggers the onset of the neurodegenerative disorder.
Commonly associated with older age, this progressive brain disease typically sees an increased risk of diagnosis as people grow older, with the average age being around 60. However, onset can occur as early as 40.
The risk of developing PD is twice as high in men than women but is known to progress faster and be more lethal to female patients.
Living with Parkinson’s
Ross Lane, a retired industrial electrician living in Courtenay, was diagnosed last year with the neurodegenerative condition at 76 years old.
Feeling increasingly tired, Lane first met with a sleep doctor who diagnosed him with sleep apnea. After visiting a clinic in Nanaimo, he was given a machine to help him sleep, but after a few months, his condition didn’t seem to improve.
“I (went back to my doctor) and by that time I had clear symptoms,” Lane said. “When I would reach for something, my hand would move very slowly. When I was writing, (everything) would get very tiny. After seeing this, my doctor said ‘That doesn’t sound like a sleep problem, it sounds like Parkinson’s.’”
Struggling with various motor and non-motor symptoms, Lane said that some are more apparent than others.
“When I walk, I stagger around like I’m drunk, but I haven’t had a drink in years,” Lane said.
When asked how it was to live with Parkinson’s disease, the man explained it was as if somehow, his “muscles forgot how to do stuff (he’s) been doing forever.”
Despite living independently, Lane finds that life’s most basic tasks often pose serious challenges daily.
“Normally, you wouldn’t really even think about dressing up because you would just whip your pants on or whatever,” said Lane. “But when you have Parkinson’s, you have much less mobility so I really struggle. That’s one of the reasons I went back to coveralls.”
Some things that many might consider trivial, like flipping pancakes or cleaning one’s home, take considerably more time and energy for Lane to accomplish.
Regardless of these physical limitations, the retiree mentioned that one of the most debilitating parts of Parkinson’s is the isolating nature of this disease. After surrendering his driver’s licence for fear of causing an accident, Lane now feels trapped within the confine of his apartment.
“It’s kind of lonely because I don’t have anybody to talk to about it,” said Lane. “Even though I’m in a support group, we only meet once a month. I can’t walk as far or as quickly as before.”
This loneliness is made worse by a lack of prognosis.
“The medical profession will not give me a prognosis and can’t tell me how quickly my disease is going to progress or (when I’m going) to be dead,” Lane said. “I feel a little abandoned.”
Comox Valley resident Bev White shares a similar story to Lane.
In 2022, at age 75, she was diagnosed with PD after her partner, Paul Atterton, asked their doctor to take a closer look at White’s gait.
In the following month, the woman was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia – which is commonly associated with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
“I think there were early signs if you knew that you were looking for. I think a lot of people don’t know (about PD’s symptoms,)” said White. “I was trying to learn how to play bridge because it’s supposed to be good for your brain, but for the life of me, I couldn’t (learn) anything beyond the very basics.”
After sharing his life for the last three decades with White, Atterton has seen the state of his partner decline drastically over the past 12 months.
“It’s been two years now and there’s been a dramatic change, especially on the cognitive side,” Atterton said. “(Her symptoms have just) exaggerated over time. The length of the awake day is shortened. Her shuffling is getting more (evident). There’s a lot of muscle stiffness, shortness of steps, loss of speech and overall confusion.”
Atterton describes every morning as a “business meeting,” during which both review the day’s schedule, ensuring they stay within a 24-hour time cycle to avoid further confusion on White’s part.
Considering herself lucky to be sharing life with her loved one, White recognized the chance she had to have a supportive partner.
“(Paul) is a rascal!” White said laughing. “But he’s been absolutely amazing and incredibly patient in the last couple of years as we’ve gone through all this.
“He makes me breakfast, lunch and dinner, and washes the dishes. He’s been very supportive and very patient. I can’t imagine where I would be without him.”
Yet, underneath this unwavering support, the couple is increasingly feeling the ever-growing weight of this disease. Having to give up his own hobbies and social life, Atterton is now fully dedicated to White.
“I don’t say that selfishly or begrudgingly, but we’re not getting the support we need and I’m basically Bev’s 24/7 health care system,” Atterton said. “She is not able to live by herself. If I wasn’t here, she’d be in the hospital today. Bev can’t manage simple things like putting out her medication, knowing what time of day it is or even what house she’s living in.”
The hardest thing for Atterton is to witness the disappearance of his lover, day by day, and watch Bev slowly become a shadow of her former self.
“(Everyday is just) like fixing a puzzle,” Atterton said. “I had Bev as a 1,000-piece puzzle and now she’s 400 pieces of it. It’s changing dramatically every day more so in the last two months than it was in the last year.”
Despite what the disease brings, White, Atterton, and Lane want to spread awareness about this progressive brain disorder.
“People seem to be afraid to even ask me what’s going on, but I’m not embarrassed by (my condition,)” Lane said. “It’s just the disease that I happen to have and I’m happy to talk about it. I don’t know if people are not curious or they’re scared to ask me questions, but I would say ask me about it if you’re interested!”
For more information about Parkinson’s disease and to learn more about services and resources available in B.C., visit parkinson.bc.ca.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.
New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.
“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.
Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.
It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.
Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.
Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.
The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.
The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.
The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.
The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.
“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.
When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.
“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.
“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.
The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.
Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.
The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.
“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.
They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.
“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
