Parkinson’s disease is a common degenerative disease of the brain. It’s associated with aging, but it doesn’t respect age. People under the age of 40 get Parkinson’s disease. It seems to be that cells are dying in the brain. We don’t know what causes that cell death and what we do know is that patients present clinically with physical and non-physical symptoms.
So, the physical symptoms people are very familiar with – slowness, shuffling, tremor and stiffness. But they’re probably less familiar with the idea of memory problems, mood problems, sleep disturbances, bladder, bowels and blood pressure. So this whole mesh of things occurs in Parkinson’s disease, and interestingly not every patient looks the same. So there seems to be a pattern of cell death in the brain that’s differing between patients and therefore they present differently. They look different, they need different treatments and everything gets tailored to the individual.
