My greetings to all,

My name is Geoff and I am new to this forum. I'm an automotive engineer by profession, but I have had the good fortune to be introduced to the medical world by catching Parkinsons Disease. I had a maternal grandmother with PD, but I also grew up on a farm on a Parkinsons Road - so the jury is out as to whether the cause is genetic or environmental...

This is a long post. But I have recently experienced some weird episodes that have made me think deeply about neurology, PD and the yawning reflex.

Up front - I think the act of yawning and stretching might be a whole body neurological event, possibly to recalibrate the brain to deal with changing muscle condition. When I yawn deeply, my Parkinsons gets better.

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I am 48 years of age and have Parkinsons Disease. I have had it for six years and it has advanced rather quickly in recent months. As a quick bit of background, to me it is a condition where I have tremors and I struggle to initiate movement. At its worst, I get to the point where I feel completely locked into my body.

Now I am a mechanical engineer by training, and I have a reasonable understanding of the principles of dynamic systems and control theory. Whilst I struggle with the mathematical side of it, I’ve got a good feel for how a control system can be seen as an incrementally stepping feedback loop - where a signal is given to initiate a desired motion, the motion is then measured by some form of sensor, an “error” is calculated between desired and actual motion, and then a processor reads the error and sends a corrective signal to alter the motion accordingly.

So I was quick to notice that PD is a failure somewhere in my onboard “control systems”. My body gets confused by the signals it receives, and gets lost somewhere in the feedback and processing loop. I lose balance, and the various lever mechanisms in my body can go into tremor – which is classic resonance “overshoot / overcompensate” behavior of a dynamic system out of whack.

Now there are all sorts of misleading descriptions of the symptoms, including that we suffer “muscle stiffness” and “muscle weakness”. I am told this by many “experts” who have spent years observing the disease, but not actually FEELING the disease.

The stiffness thing is actually a bit wrong. My muscles FEEL stiff, but they don’t actually get stiff. As in, when I get “locked in”, I feel a pain in my muscles that feels like they are under tension, but when the paramedics have picked me up, my body is completely limp.

What it feels like to me is that signals are going to my muscles to initiate motion – a light pre-tension to prime them to get ready to do something – but the muscles don’t seem to then know which way to go. It is like they are buzzing with low level contractions that aren’t big enough to initiate movement. They are priming – but then not getting the next signal to go. The system is “lost”.

In recent weeks I have noticed some rather bizarre correlations – curiously, relating to yawning .

•When I yawn and stretch, the part of me that is stretched stops tremoring and comes under control.

•What’s more, when I am waiting for my levadopa drug to “kick in” on each of my medication cycles, I get to a point where my hands and feet start to tingle and then this is followed by the urge to yawn and stretch. If the yawn and stretch is a good one, then suddenly I am “ON” and I can jump out of bed and bound into the day.

•When I try to initiate a movement and cannot do it, my body often tries to stretch the offending body part to its full extremes of motion, and I feel the desire to yawn.

•When I have a medication cycle that doesn’t kick in properly, I fall into this succession of unsatisfying yawns – as if my body is saying “that one didn’t work – try again”.

Now I am in hospital right now, and I have been asking the various medicos what the purpose of yawning is. No-one seems to know. I am going to propose this:

•A good yawn, and subsequent full body stretch, is the body’s morning calibration check. It is sort of like the self-diagnostic and movement check that for example your computer printer goes through when you turn it on.


Now the body is a delicately balanced system of levers (bones) pulled by contracting actuators (muscles). The muscles are activated by the neurological system controlled by a processing unit (the brain). If for example we wish to control our lower arm movement, we need to learn the relative tensions in the biceps and triceps to establish equilibrium, and thus the brain needs to learn the signal strength it needs to send to each of the muscles.

But the muscles themselves change with time. They get stronger or weaker depending on damage, use, health etc. So the body needs to undergo regular recalibration checks. Potential procedure to do so – lightly tension opposing muscles (e.g. biceps/triceps), and register in brain the relative signal strengths required for equilibrium – preferably at some repeatable datum point (e.g full stretch or full contraction).

What do we do when we yawn? We slowly stretch muscles to their extension and contraction limits, apply a light tension to them, and repeat this for a succession of muscle groups throughout the body. We think of yawning in terms of it being a breathing / throat-based event of sorts, but to me it is simply the first muscle system that we are testing. If we indulge in the full yawn, we can feel the stretching/tensioning tests progressing from throat to face to chest, torso, arms and maybe even legs. If yawning was a breathing event, why would it progress to legs and arms?

So why does the yawn and stretch process occur in a range of animals and not just humans. All animals with neurological systems would need a regular recalibration of the system. Why start with the throat? Well, I am thinking this. The throat is the closest muscle system to the brain stem, and the first branches of the nervous system are around the face/throat area. The brain stem is where dopamine is generated.

Maybe dopamine initiates the “full body system muscular calibration check”. It initiates it firstly in the closest muscle system, the throat. Once that system is checked, the rolling calibration check moves through the mouth, the neck, torso, shoulders, arms, legs etc.

The theory seems to explain some stuff about yawning that scientists have yet to explain properly. Contagious yawning? Well, if your competitor in the game of life is recalibrating and fine-tuning their neurological system to beat you to that tasty rabbit that is running past, you had better do the same. Athletes yawning? Fine-tuning themselves for the race.

So my condition, with its lack of dopamine, has trouble running the calibration check. It certainly feels like it. It feels like my body system wants to move, and can move, but does not really know where it is at relative to its datum points. It is lost.

In recent days, I have on a number of occasions (but not every time) managed to "snap" myself from an uncoordinated state to fully "on" in minutes. Medication did assist.

I’m pretty excited about this. I asked the physio here if he could look up links between yawning and dopamine. He came back five minutes later with news of a heap of search results, and in the paper he gave me dopamine was the first chemical mentioned. But the yawning event itself remained unexplained. It seems the link is there – but it seems no-one knows why.

If a bodily function is semi-unconscious, seems to be initiated in the brain stem, and is repeated behavior across species, I have a feeling it is more significant than a signal that we are a bit sleepy.

I haven’t been particularly scientific about this thus far, but it certainly seems interesting and promising. I am formulating some ideas on how to pull this together into some sort of study or even a potential PhD thesis. No-one seems to have come up with a decent explanation of what yawning and subsequent stretching is all about (and I reject the notion of it being about oxygen or carbon dioxide – I can simply breathe more heavily if that was the purpose, and I could do it without getting arms and torso and legs involved.) Viewing the body as a mechanical control system that needs regular recalibration seems to give the yawning process a purpose.

I would be very interested in your thoughts…

Kind regards,

Geoff

Geoff,

Welcome to the forum. It's good to see another engineer posting - my background is in computing and mathematics.

I like your yawning theory.

Measure it! It should be easy to build a yawning, tremor and movement detector for, perhaps, £30 using an Arduino microcontroller. Or, possibly, a better, but limited, way for free would be to use your web cam and a spot of image processing.

John

Welcome to the board Jeoff, sorry you have to deal with PD.

Keep those thoughts going. Perhaps a series of coordination tests, then repeated immediately after yawning would be in order. Something as simple as that might help you to understand better what is happening. Even a typing test might work, as in words per minute vs error rates.

Best of luck to you!

Thanks John and BR, I appreciate your responses.

Measuring is going to be a little hard given my main problem is less the tremor than it is stillness and lack of co-ordination. But I am pushing for a possible PhD so i might get access to brain scanning equipment. The PD is a small thing. I'm actually more interested in trying to find the underlying meaning of yawning.

Cheers!

Geoff

If "PD is a small thing" then your PhD is going to win a Nobel Prize!

Following on from BreezyRacers's idea, I find that the side to side tap test (counting the number of times you can type q followed by p in a fixed period using just one finger) gives good results. You can run this test online at:

http://www.parkinsonsmeasurement.org...eToSideTap.htm

John

Now that is a good idea for a test - it should work well. Thanks John.

In a less scientific sense, I have been playing guitar as a way of informally assessing my capability. I certainly do better after a good yawn and stretch. But as for measurables - I suppose number of notes fluffed within a given piece?

Cheers!

Geoff

Geoff you may find of interest Norman Doidges' latest book "The Brain that Changes Itself" on brain plasticity where examples of people who have been able to create alternative circuitry (wire new neuronal pathways ) including a man with parkinsons. I have experienced this with yoga and chi gong...apecifically when my fooot drops II cann move through iit by doing a technique called arrow and bow walking (very slowly).

I have felt intuitively for many years now that from an energetic perspective parkinsons has big issues in the 5th chakra (located at the throat). Also recent research with electroceuticals and the vagus nerve seem relevant to your experience. here is an article excerpt:

"Science More: Mosaic Innovation Brain Disease
There's a single nerve that connects all of your vital organs — and it might just be the future of medicine
Mosaic
GAIA VINCE, MOSAIC
JUN. 1, 2015, 6:20 PM 15,759 3
FACEBOOK
LINKEDIN
TWITTER

The nerve hunter
Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon based in New York, is a man haunted by personal events – a man with a mission. “My mother died from a brain tumour when I was five years old. It was very sudden and unexpected,” he says. “And I learned from that experience that the brain – nerves – are responsible for health

In the late 1990s, Tracey was experimenting with a rat’s brain. “We’d injected an anti-inflammatory drug into the brain because we were studying the beneficial effect of blocking inflammation during a stroke,” he recalls. “We were surprised to find that when the drug was present in the brain, it also blocked inflammation in the spleen and in other organs in the rest of the body. Yet the amount of drug we’d injected was far too small to have got into the bloodstream and travelled to the rest of the body.”

After months puzzling over this, he finally hit upon the idea that the brain might be using the nervous system – specifically the vagus nerve – to tell the spleen to switch off inflammation everywhere.

It was an extraordinary idea – if Tracey was right, inflammation in body tissues was being directly regulated by the brain.

If Tracey was right, inflammation in body tissues was being directly regulated by the brain.
Communication between the immune system’s specialist cells in our organs and bloodstream and the electrical connections of the nervous system had been considered impossible. Now Tracey was apparently discovering that the two systems were intricately linked.

The first critical test of this exciting hypothesis was to cut the vagus nerve.

When Tracey and his team did, injecting the anti-inflammatory drug into the brain no longer had an effect on the rest of the body. The second test was to stimulate the nerve without any drug in the system.

“Because the vagus nerve, like all nerves, communicates information through electrical signals, it meant that we should be able to replicate the experiment by putting a nerve stimulator on the vagus nerve in the brainstem to block inflammation in the spleen,” he explains. “That’s what we did and that was the breakthrough experiment.”

brainstemJeff Lichtman/Harvard University via WBURAn image of a human brain stem illuminated with fluorescent proteins.

The wandering nerve
The vagus nerve starts in the brainstem, just behind the ears.

It travels down each side of the neck, across the chest and down through the abdomen. ‘Vagus’ is Latin for ‘wandering’ and indeed this bundle of nerve fibres roves through the body, networking the brain with the stomach and digestive tract, the lungs, heart, spleen, intestines, liver and kidneys, not to mention a range of other nerves that are involved in speech, eye contact, facial expressions and even your ability to tune in to other people’s voices.

It is made of thousands and thousands of fibres and 80 per cent of them are sensory, meaning that the vagus nerve reports back to your brain what is going on in your organs.

Operating far below the level of our conscious minds, the vagus nerve is vital for keeping our bodies healthy. It is an essential part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for calming organs after the stressed ‘fight-or-flight’ adrenaline response to danger. Not all vagus nerves are the same, however: some people have stronger vagus activity, which means their bodies can relax faster after a stress.



Read more: http://mosaicscience.com/story/hacki...#ixzz3crDxeBCb

automotive engineers, making us auto mechanics wonder what you were thinking when you designed it that way.

i notice that when i am getting to the point of my tremors ending that i start yawning also. i thought the same thing, that somehow a part of the brain is trying to reset itself.

hi Geoff
In a post above you ask the purpose of yawning. Interesting question with a recent idea that it's to cool the brain. Can't imagine if that has any relevance to your ideas but thought it interesting.
Here is one link
http://www.livescience.com/39862-why-do-we-yawn.html

Not to be confused with the Vegas nerve that is required to bet your life savings on one spin of the roulette wheel.