Fascinating series. Watch it even if you are not overweight. You'll learn a lot. The villain in this piece is fructose, found in table sugar or corn syrup. Of particular interest is part 4 about addiction. It turns out that fructose, like heroin or cocaine, downregulates dopamine receptors in the pleasure center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens causing addiction. It also turns out that the nucleus accumbens is in the basal ganglia in close proximity to the substantia nigra. Is it not possible that receptors there are also downregulated?

It is thought that the dopamine receptors in PD are not destroyed but merely dormant in many cases. If so, could PD be the result of excess sugar consumption? PD did not become prevalent until the industrial revolution when sugar appeared in our diet in large amounts. Perhaps some people have a genetic predisposition to sugar sensitivity in that part of the brain.

Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0zD1gj0pXk

Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ndTEu_qDGA

Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo3TRbkIrow

Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1cI8FNU6M

Part 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of-qvDprr0w

Part 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0WdRhau_No

Part 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWnbMnnLo5w

Extra http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAqcb...feature=relmfu

I don't agree with the political prescription but the facts are important to consider.

http://www.parkinsons.org/parkinsons-history.html

we also live a lot longer so more of us will develop pd.
we also have many more synthetic chemicals in our environment.

fructose sugar was commercialized in 1969.
http://www.livestrong.com/article/17...p-vs-fructose/

distribution of pd
http://************/parkinsons.disease/prevalence.htm
(insert the following in the asterisk area, for some reason link is automatically blanked out. remove the spaces

v i a r t i s.net

PD apparently has a lot of causes, age and toxicity from various sources, being some of them. It might be an overlooked coincidence that PD was rarely observed before the industrial revolution and that solvents and other chemicals use increased along with sugar consumption. http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1132

Sucrose, or table sugar consists of glucose and fructose. Consumption in Dr. Parkinson's day was a small fraction of today's intake. http://articles.businessinsider.com/...apita-american

Sugar might be part of the story or have no relationship at all but I find it interesting.

sure it's interesting, there's more research on the connection between insulin, diabetes and pd.
i also think statistics on health problems weren't very good prior to the industrial revolution or even prior to the information revolution.

it would be easy to correlate obesity levels and pd in a country like sweden where they keep national health statistics but like with any correlation, there could be a totally different cause in play like an increase in a food additives, etc.

once pd biomarkers are identified and inexpensive tests developed, the environmental causes should be much easier to identify since you will be able to measure progression on a huge population on even a weekly schedule. and test diet's affect on pd. and find disease slowing drugs.

"downregulates dopamine receptors in the pleasure center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens causing addiction"

Haven't watched the links, but found the above interesting. Anhedonia (lack of pleasure) is something that can occur in PD, along with a kind of depression without sadness. Wondered if this could be a less tangible effect.

socertese writes: "once pd biomarkers are identified and inexpensive tests developed, the environmental causes should be much easier to identify since you will be able to measure progression on a huge population on even a weekly schedule. and test diet's affect on pd. and find disease slowing drugs."

That can be done now by:
http://www.parkinsonsmeasurement.org/PDMeasure/

Although better markers are likely to be found by the ongoing research, there's no need to wait, 1, 2, or whatever, years before collecting data. You can start now. There are a number of simple measures that correlate with PD. The one I'm most familiar with is the side to side tapping test. This can be measured on the computer and the results sent to a database. It's not just inexpensive, it's free. It can be measured hourly or better. What's needed is for PwP to donate their data.

Garcia-Ruiz et al. [1] write: "All CAPIT timed tests, especially tapping, maintained an excellent correlation with UPDRS in both off and on state. Tapping seems to be the best CAPIT timed test for objective motor evaluation of PD." Our side to side test is similar to their "tapping" test.

A study investigating the relationship between sugar and PD would be a good one for us to look at.

On the information to hand now, I compared US, county level prevalence maps for:
- diabetes [2]
- obesity [2]
- Parkinson's [3]

It's a pity we don't have the raw data. Without it we can't do a proper analysis. But, "eye-balling" the maps, it looks, to me, like there's a correlation between these other conditions and PD. They are correlated with sugar consumption, so the suspicion is that PD is too. (As a technical point, one needs to be careful: correlation is not "transitive". In certain conditions, A can be positively correlated with B, B with C, but not A with C.)

I see the aetiology of Parkinson's in the following way: genetics sets a bar, high for some, low for others; aging lowers the bar. Eventually, provided something else doesn't get you first, lifestyle, environmental and biological toxins and illness aggregate to take you over the bar, where auto-immune responses accelerate the effect.

If this model is correct, if only we knew what they were, we can do something to slow the progression of PD, even in advanced cases. For instance, a question I would like answering is:

What effect on the rate of progression of my PD would a strict sugar free diet make?

As it is, I find sweet things sometimes reduce the symptoms of PD slightly.

References:

[1] "The usefulness of timed motor tests in assessing Parkinson's disease"
García-Ruiz PJ, Sánchez-Bernardos V, Cabo-López L
Revista de Neurologia [2009, 48(12):617-619]
http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/19507119

[2] "Estimated County-Level Prevalence of Diabetes and Obesity --- United States, 2007"
CDC
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5845a2.htm

[3] "Geographic and Ethnic Variation in Parkinson Disease: A Population-Based Study of US Medicare Beneficiaries"
Allison Wright Willis,a,* Bradley A. Evanoff,b Min Lian,b Susan R. Criswell,a and Brad A. Racette
Neuroepidemiology. 2010 April; 34(3): 143–151
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865395/

John

John,

There are many who believe that PD and Alz. are simply another type of diabetes. I'm starting another thread to link some of this together. Thanks for your youtube find.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18335520

Excess sugar binds with proteins creating Advanced Glycation End products (AGE's) that interfere with protein functions. This has been studied well in diabetes where it causes blindness, neuropathy, etc. but not so much in neurology.

It apparently damages neurons as well:

"Our results show that AGEs promote in vitro cross-linking of alpha-synuclein, that intracellular accumulation of AGEs precedes alpha-synuclein-positive inclusion body formation, and that extracellular AGEs accelerate the process of intracellular alpha-synuclein-positive inclusion body formation."

This may be a mechanism by which fructose damages neurons in PD.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9749578