Yes, 60 was once old. But my first tremor showed up in 1992 at the age of 39. An awful lot of us fall into the young onset category and I believe it to be different from senior onset which may well be normal ageing.

Even YOPD seems common enough and symptoms dramatic enough that some Pope or Prince would have had it and some scribe have noted it. But the examples commonly cited are so ambiguous that it is impossible to say that it was PD.

And take Dr. P's original article describing the condition. Why did he consider it of note? More importantly, why did he only have six cases to report and a number of those (2, I think) were not people he had examined, but were instead people he had seen pass on the street and never saw again. He had continued his father's medical practice at the same London location for fifty years. If he could not cite more cases than the six, isn't that odd?

The Industrial Revolution had been going for 75 years or so. London was a smoggy mess. Workers had left the familiar and supportive rural life for a sometimes hellish urban one. (Heck, we still use the adjective "Dickensian") Stress levels were way up.

But PD is never simple. Along with the stress, there were at least two other things I wonder about. One was that British traders had in the same period made sugar affordable and common. The other was the huge increase in sooty "particulate" pollution. Ultra Fine Particulates (UFPs) are tiny nanoparticles so small that they can go about anywhere. They can even travel along the transport systems within the long neuronal fiber of the axon. Even more interesting, they can latch on to other molecules that then "piggyback" with them past defensive membranes.

So, what happens when a person born sensitized to the bacterial toxin LPS inhales an UFP wed to a molecule of that toxin which penetrates the mucal barriers around the olfactory nerve and rides the little conveyor into the olfactory bulb? No one knows but I don't like the sound of it.

Maybe a healthy person can handle it, but what of a stressed out person? I'm sure the immune system would notice and inflammation would become a factor. Of course, that would just add in to the existing stress-generated inflammation which had been tearing at the BBB.

A few decades of this and enough brain cells lost to the immune response could lead to a tremor or two. And the spinning top of the endocrine system would begin to wobble. And everyone would assume that it was a neurological disease when it was actually the nervous system being the victim of the immune and endocrine.

(Just in case I am right and win a large Swedish prize someday, I want it on record that Anne Frobert, MD, gets equal billing or blame as the case may be. )

MJFF, are you listening?