I visited my new neurologist in St. Louis this month and per the theme of the spaghetti western "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", here is what I was told. First, the bad: Very certain that I have Parkinson's Disease (PD) and that I have probably had the symptoms per my description for about 2 years. The good: It is likely I have a "good form" of PD in that those patients that have tremors versus those who do not in early stages tend to have a much slower progression of the disease. Further, tests for a disease called "Wilson's Disease" were negative (that would have been the "Ugly").
For treatment, they have started me on a regimine of a drug called Sinemet which is a combination of two drugs that the brain turns into Dopamine. The first week was at half dose and while the amplitude of tremors went down, the tremors persist on my left side. Now I am up to full dose and I am finding that spacing between the doses are important. We'll see how things go into June...
No comments:
Post a Comment