thank you paula - and (i am about to get a little agitated and want you to know it is not directed at you or anyone w/pd but rather at the research community which has - yet again - bought in wholesale to a theory for which no one can provide supporting evidence0)

i know that depression as a symptom has become conventional wisdom at this point but here i go again, bucking the tide - i have been looking high and low for any evidence that this is the case - a study that compared incidence of depression in PWP to that in people with cystic fibrosis, rheumatoid arthritis, any degenerative disease that doesn't involve the brain, but there are none.

i have asked at least four researchers, two of whom are considered to be experts in the field and one who is starting out in the field and another whose specialty within neuroscience i don't know; the last person i mentioned had pretty much just taken others' word for it; the third person i mentioned said hey, you're right, i haven't found anything either; one expert told me essentially there was no hard evidence, and the second expert never responded to my email - and i have read all of her papers on pd and depression and not one of them addresses the question of whether it is a symptom or not.

so far the *only* "evidence" that i have seen is 1) that depression rates are higher among pwp than they are among the general population, and 2) that pwp are more likely to have been depressed before either onset or diagnosis (not sure which) than pwop (people without parkinson's).

depression rates being higher among pwp proves nothing - pd sucks - it is no wonder 50% of us are depressed - who wouldn't be? and you know what? the depression rate among people with asthma is 50% too, so there you go.

and as far is it pre-dating the disease itself being proof it is a symptom, consider the fact that depressed people are far more likely, i.e., 1.6 times more likely (that's HUGE) to develop coronary artery disease - but ain't no one calling depression a symptom of coronary artery disease, are they? no, they are not.

the stats re asthma and coronary artery disease came from a 2005 paper you can read for free here:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/art...medid=15670467

yet again, the research world boggles me.