The Cause of Parkinson’s Disease
The reality today is that healthcare providers work in increasingly time pressured environments, and rarely have time to read every person’s journal in order to create a personalised approach to your care. This can leave you feeling poorly informed, disconnected with your healthcare team, and worried about your future. .
Functional Medicine is a much more individualised approach developed to better understand your personal health and wellness challenges, and give you practical, realistic tools that will allow you to simply manage better and feel more joyful and positive in the every day.
The Mechanism of Parkinson’s Disease
In this short review, we highlight the importance of thinking deeper when it comes to causes of the disease. We’ve all read the re-hashed causes of Parkinson’s around the ‘unknown’ and the potential genetics. We’re different. We take a huge interest in investigating emerging lifestyle research, and integrate that with what we know about how the body works. Or rather how our organs and cells are designed to work.
The Parkinson’s Symptoms
Here’s the science (and the bit you probably already know). Prominent signs and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease occur when nerve cells in a particular part of the brain (‘basal ganglia’) die or become impaired.
Normally, these nerve cells, or neurons, produce an important brain chemical known as dopamine. The lack thereof in the condition, causing the movement problems associated with the Parkinsons’.
Scientists still do not know what causes the neurons to die, and this is the bit we’re interested in understanding and researching from a lifestyle perspective, in the work that we do.
What about Nutrition and Parkinson’s?
Whilst nutrients may be irrelevant to disease progression, many nutrients from the diet are intrinsinctly linked with the production of Dopamine.
Calcium is one example of a nutrient which helps release dopamine within the nerve (cell), and so is important to measure in Parkinsons. There are a number of reasons why a person may consuming adequate calcium but absorption is potentially poor such as certain medication (acid reflux medication) or far more unknown causes such as oxalic acid rich foods or a problem with clearing oxalates. Symptoms may include constipation, restless legs and more.
A less known fact is that people with Parkinson’s disease also lose the nerve endings that produce norepinephrine which is another nervous system chemical that regulates some of our ‘stress’ nervous system. This also controls many functions of the body, such as heart rate and blood pressure. The loss of norepinephrine might help explain some of the non-movement features of Parkinson’s, such as fatigue, irregular blood pressure, decreased movement of food through the digestive tract, and sudden drop in blood pressure when a person stands up from a sitting or lying position.
The Very Earliest of Signs
Very early signs of PD are not well documented or understood due to the set-up of modern healthcare. We have come across patients with irregular movement of the body a good number of years before diagnosis, usually observed by family members.
Is the genetic element of Parkinsons relevant?
Whilst there are some types that are genetic, the disease do not generally run in families, making the often documented genetic link rather irrelevant in our personal opinion. Because we’re concerned with lifestyle and environmental factors (and this is often thought of as being 80% of our ‘genes’), our belief is that that we’re better off focussing on what we can do to make a difference.
But first, we need to understand how the disease affects the body, and what in the body goes wrong.
Opportunity to Intervene to Make a Positive Impact
Because the rate of Parkinsons disease progression differ among individuals, we feel there is an excellent window to make a positive impact, both on wellbeing but also on disease resilience.
Early symptoms of this disease are subtle and occur gradually. It may be affecting one side only. For example, family members may notice how an arm or leg, or how you move your neck to look around you as unusual and irregular. They may notice your voice has changed or you may feel your handwriting has changed. Perhaps you’ll look in the mirror and notice more of a blank expression less face.
Because the gait leans you forward, there will need to be an adaptation to keep the balance, with less arm swinging and smaller, quicker steps.
Another effect of low dopamine and brain changes may be how you feel. Problems with memory, focus, your feeling of ‘out-goingness’ and the ability to plan can all be affected. This can be frustrating but be supported with a functional medicine, root-cause support approach.
How do you Diagnose Parkinson’s?
Other disorders can cause symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease —like multiple system atrophy or brain decline (dementia with Lewy bodies) —they’re often referred to as parkinsonism. These conditions can initially be mistaken for Parkinson’s disease, but specific medical tests and how a person responds to medications can help clarify the diagnosis. Because many of these disorders share symptoms but require different treatments, getting an accurate diagnosis as early as possible is essential.
What is the cause of Parkinson’s?
In functional medicine, we focus on what we do know, not what we don’t know. We don’t have all the answers as to what’s causing Parkinson’s, and perhaps given the multifactorial-ness of the condition, we never will. We’re certainly not here to claim we can cure you but we know from the research that some body functions matter. From an integrative, lifestyle medicine approach, there are a number of top priority areas to consider in Parkinson’s disease.
These include:
The behaviour of your immune system, e.g inflammation, autoimmunity
Blood sugar and imbalanced metabolism
Iron overload
Environmental toxins
Pre existing gut dysfunction, organisms and gluten
Parkinson’s and Inflammation
Interestingly, what we know about point 2-5 above, is that they can all trigger inflammation, which is a disease or an imbalance in your body’s ‘react/don’t react’ immune system control (which you can think of as our army of soldiers). Parkinson’s has not been proven to be an auto-immune condition or by inflammation alone, and we also need to understand more about which came first - the inflammation (consequence of PD?) or cause.
You can read more here: https://www.parkinson.org/blog/science-news/inflammation
Your Next Step in your Parkinson’s Journey: Raise your Emotional & Physical Wellbeing.
At the Parkinson’s Wellness Centre, we want to get you a much more targeted, specific and informed approach to managing your disease and your wellness.
Book an Intro call with us today, to learn how we may help you:
Uncover your physiology’s unique needs
Personalised and simplify your diet to feed your brain and nerves
Pinpoint your personal drivers for inflammation by plugging nutritional gaps and removing what we like to refer to as ‘irritants’
