What is Parkinson's Disease?

Question

I need to know? What is Parkinson's Disease? And how is it formed?

Answer 1

This website should help you out a bunch if you need to know the answer

Answer 2

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive and disabling neurological condition in which the brain is no longer able to produce sufficient amounts of the neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that makes it easy for us to control our movements and to do them smoothly.

As to what exactly causes the disease is unknown. Something causes the dopamine-producing cells in the brain to die off in people with PD. By the time 80% of these cells have died off, the symptoms of Parkinson’s appears.

The primary symptoms of the disease are problems with motor skill problems, namely tremor, slowness of movement, rigidity of limbs, and difficulty staying balanced. A person’s face muscles usually become stiff and hard to the move, their handwriting becomes cramped and often hard to read, and PD generally causes a person to have a shuffling walk.

Both men and women can get PD, though there appears to be a slightly larger number of males with the disease, and average age of onset is generally around 65. However there are people like myself who have PD who get it in their youth. First signs of the disease showed up in me before age 25. I am now 41. Around 10 to perhaps as high as 15% of those with PD develop the disease before 65.

The disease is not contagious, and alone it is not fatal (though it can cause medical complications that are).  Of all the neurological diseases it is the only one that can have its major symptoms controlled (at least partially in most cases) with the use of medication and/or surgical procedures. Still there is no cure, and the jury is out as to whether or not the disease can be passed down through the generations. It can also take a very long time to get a diagnosis of PD if you are young as doctors are just now learning that the identifying markers for younger persons can greatly differ from what they are used to seeing in older persons.