Carey, Paula,
Because of your posts I have read and re-read the article, and I think there is a huge amount in it that needs discussion, there is a very revisionist quality to it. For instance there is a statement that many people in the pre-levodopa era died before exhibiting the non-dopaminergic symptoms, that they in other words died prematurely. This is not anything that I have seen expressed elsewhere, and I grew up with my untreated grandmother, who had PD and lived into her eighties, certainly over 30 years with PD, and it was my understanding that this was normal in untreated PD. She certainly had the non-motor symptoms. It was not an unusual condition in my community, in fact there are descriptions in modern writing that bear this out. So I don't quite buy the idea that the motor symptoms masked the non-motor in days before levodopa........, or that the differences between non-motor, non-dopaminergic and dopaminergic symptoms were not evident and visible - ignored, not considered, or regarded as untreatable maybe...

The article does however define different aspects of PD well, and moves us into this unknown potentiality of a post-dopaminergic phase of PD - though I do not think we are anywhere near resolving the dopaminergic stage yet. I am not the expert, just a patient, yet I find this article both hugely hope-making from one type of reading, and rather disconcerting from another.

I am really glad that Laura brought it to our attention, not the least because it expresses some things that patients have been discussing for all of the time that I have been on the forums! As though these things are fresh and new.........

The history notwithstanding, I would like to see more opinion on the content of the interview.............

Lindy