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Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease

There is a rather large number of patients who can give no history of any significant previous illness whatsoever to account for the disorder. "It just came on gradually", they often say. "I was never sick a day in my life before that." But many specialists are convinced that these patients are actually suffering from the inflammatory form of the disease, that some virus or germ was present in their bodies at one time or another without producing any noticeable signs or symptoms. According to this school of medical opinion, even an ordinary slight common cold could have been responsible for the presence of the virus.

Thus far this theory has not been proven, and these patients are said to be suffering from idiopathic Parkinson's Disease, or Parkinson's Disease of unknown origin. In as much as no disease can exist without a cause, it would seem logical to assign to the virus its responsible role until such time as proof of its responsibility can be established or refuted.

At the time of this writing, of course - in so far as the individual patient is concerned-medical theories concerning idiopathic Parkinson's Disease are of no particular interest.
 
The patient who has the disease wants and expects something to be done about it. Whether it is caused by a virus or some other undiscovered agent makes no significant difference in the treatment, which is directed toward relieving the shaking and the stiffness.

Arteriosclerotic Parkinson's Disease 

We have discussed the inflammatory causes of the disease, and the idiopathic form. Another causative agent looms large and accounts for many patients. It is directly or indirectly responsible, perhaps, for more human misery in the later years of life than any other affliction. Its medical name is arteriosclerosis, commonly known as hardening of the arteries.

Now, if an individual's arteries merely hardened, and showed no other change, probably no one would be the wiser, or at least the sadder. But an unfortunate accompaniment of the hardening process is a thickening of the arterial walls, resulting in a corresponding decrease in the volume of the blood vessels. This situation is analogous to the crusting of a water pipe due to lime deposits, which may reduce not only the flow of water but eventually interrupt it altogether.

 Nature, for reasons as yet unknown, often allows a crusting of calcium to form on the inner walls of the arteries, doing just what such a process does to a water pipe-cutting the size of the inner diameter. In a blood vessel this means that a normal supply of blood cannot be transported as it should be, and as a result the part of the body supplied by that particular blood vessel will be correspondingly starved for nourishment.

Symptoms of disease produced by hardening of the arteries will naturally depend upon just which arteries are most severely affected. Thus, if the heart arteries begin to harden, the heart muscle will be deprived of its normal blood supply, and heart disease will be the inevitable result. If the arteries of the legs are primarily affected, and if remedial measures are not effective, circulation in the legs is impaired. If, on the other hand, the hardening process occurs in the brain, various brain diseases will result. And carrying this process a step further, scientists have demonstrated that if hardening of the arteries occurs in the area of the brain known as the basal ganglia - where the "governor of steadiness" is situated -typical symptoms of Parkinson's Disease will result.

Should you ask the embarrassing question: "Why does the hardening so often select those particular arteries?" scientists would have to shake their heads, stroke their beards, and remain silent, for no one at the present time has the slightest idea of what the reason may be.

Parkinson's Disease resulting from hardening of the arteries seldom occurs before the age of sixty, and is usually associated with other evidence of advancing age. In many ways the disease, when it strikes the aged and the aging, is most tragic of all, for it frequently conveys with it the mistaken notion that nothing at all can be done, and that nothing should be tried. This is far from the truth. Many utterly helpless elderly patients literally have arisen from their beds and walked again, after a comprehensive and persistently applied program of treatment. And if, in the long run, the disease eventually has reclaimed its intended victim, the patient at least has had the benefit of an extra dividend of a relatively happy and useful life.

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