just to clarify - i am not trying to prove it is not a symptom, i am trying to show that - as far as i have been able to find, both on my own and in consultation with 'experts,' - that all of the supporting arguments of which i am aware are either effortlessly knocked down or irrelevant to begin with. and apparently, at least three out of four researchers i consulted - the fourth, irene richard, did not respond to my query - are also unaware of any more solid evidence, or i would imagine they would have put it forward.

regarding irene's piece in the fox foundation newsletter, if you read it again, you will see that she does not offer any evidence to support her assertion that it is a symptom - none, not a shred - just says "this is so," and thus, it was so.

so, i looked again for papers by her and found one i had missed before, in which, unlike the three preceding and several subsequent papers, the authors did address the question of depression as symptom - or perhaps i should be more precise because what we are really talking about in PD would be more accurately termed "depressive symptoms" (DS). in fact, i just stumbled across a statistic - in this very same paper - that put rates of actual, clinical depression in PD quite low - 3-8%, which is much lower than that of the general population, and i have to ask why THAT isn't drawing anyone's attention?

god do i get sucked into this research stuff - and ramble on too. i will try to get to the point of mentioning this paper.

the authors put forth the supporting arguments for DS being reactive and then cite studies to refute them - must read those cited studies.

then they put forth the supporting arguments for DS being a symptom - these are much more detailed and get into the nitty gritty of neurochemistry. but - someone tell me if i am crazy - please read the following bit from this paper:

"Parkinson disease patients with comorbid depression have smaller subcortical nuclei, which is similar to non-PD patients with depression."

and

"Decreased metabolism in the frontal cortex-basal gangliathalamic loop of Parkinson patients is similar to the pattern shown in metabolic studies of non-PD patients with major depression.”

call me crazy, but i thought the fundamental assertion here was that it was a symptom of the disease, which would have to mean that it is in some way measurably *different* from non-PD depression, not the *same!* pointing out similarities to physiological changes that occur in depression that *is* considered to be reactive as evidence to support one's assertion that PD depression is *not* reactive flies in the face oof logic, doesn't it?

anyway - i wander.

in short my argument is not that it is not a symptom but that there is zero definitive evidence to support the argument that it *is* a symptom.

this is important because there is a finite amount of PD funding out there, so it behooves us to be pretty darned sure of the validity of X before we start throwing money at it, because if we spend it on X, we can't spend it on Y.

and i am nowhere near convinced of the validity of X, so the gobs of research funding that are being lobbed at the problem of X are, in my opinion, premature and perhaps ultimately misguided.

and that concerns me, because there are plenty of facets of PD about which there is zero doubt that they are symptoms, and none of those has yet been effectively dealt with for anywhere near as long as people live with this disease.

peggy, i will look into what you are suggesting this weekend. i was supposed to be workiing all night and instead i did this!

b