I'm a bit surprised to be reading on the internet about how many people "with PD" have had the DaTscan and it shows things are normal upstairs. People with long-standing tremor, cogwheel rigidity, no arm swing, etc., and many of the ones I've read about are YOUNG! How can people have classic PD symptoms, whatever those really are, and yet their DaTscan shows no degeneration?

Am I missing something? Does taking PD drugs mask things so that an otherwise degenerated substantia nigra appears normal on the scan?

I was thinking this scan could be so very useful, but if as many PWP as I'm reading about are having "normal" DaTscanrs of their brains, what does this tell us? I feel like these results are showing us just how flawed the thinking about PD has been for many decades. Wrong?

And getting to the core: what if you had a DaTscan, and it showed things were normal, like Harley...what would you do? You still have tremor, rigidity, etc., but now the scan would be saying, hey, nothing out of the ordinary here! Do you stop taking your PD drugs? But you still have symptoms! What could/would a doctor do at that point?