Thanks to Laura's post about BMAA and articles cited there, I did some research about zinc. Taking too much can be dangerous, as with most everything, but guess what the symptoms are if you are deficient in zinc?

■white spots or bands under your fingernails
■fatigue
■diarrhea
■reduced sense of taste or smell


Does PD start off as a zinc deficiency and progress from there? Perhaps a zinc-based pill (currently in phase II trials, see Laura's post on BMAA) can help eradicate BMAA for those exposed to it, since there is no "antidote" to BMAA exposure that I have been able to find.

Curiously we tend to have zinc deficiency too! See the link via a former post to:


Brain-Delivery of Zinc-Ions as Potential Treatment for Neurological Diseases: Mini Review.

How would we ever know? It's not present on standard blood panels from what I recall.

It makes a lot of sense this would be something we share in common because although we get PD in different ways (except for vascular). cyanobacteria or BMAA is so common it transcends all the other genetic based deficiencies that exempt idiopathic PDers. Though oddly genetics still must play a part.

It sounds like they could screen us eventually via cerebral spinal fluid draw but they aren't quite there yet. If they could prove this hypothesis it seems like a lot of other things are in place to speed up diagnostic tools and treatments.

Laura

My understanding is that testing for zinc is difficult because like many things, it is inside the cell that counts, and they cannot test that! Grrr...

Additionally, I found it very curious that zinc is involved in many things (protein synthesis, for one) and requires, note, vitamins A and D (something most PWP are notoriously deficient in) to be used.

But what really got me was the effect on the sense of smell, that is something that screams "PD" to the medicaly community yet here it is, caused by a deficiency in zinc. Who knew.