Stress and PD - Something new
 

I find this interesting and potentially important. I did my own study and did pretty well for a rookie IMHO.

Using PLM's member data, I put together a list of 150 "middle of the road" PWP and asked if thet would take time to answer a set of questions about stress and PD. Of those, 39 agreed. I used a set of 29 questions the core of which asked about stress during six periods of their life covering the period from conception to PD symptom appearance. They rated stress levels from 1 to 5 with 1 being defined as a "normal" stress burden.

The stress levels reported were startling. Over a lifetime, the group averaged a 3. That is, without eliminating anyone, we had triple the stress in our lives compared to normal folk. Further, the amount of stress we had endured corresponded with the sensitivity we had today and the impact on our symptoms.

The document is too big to post here, but you can read it at http://www.parkinsonsonline.org/foru...286&p=513#p513 or if you email me I will send you a copy.

The comments of the participants is particularly telling and form a mirror image to the discussions on the same subject which we held on the old BT forum. Life has put a lot of us through a meat grinder!

The bottom line is that stress response = endocrine system and research needs to take that into account.

Hm, I just realized that I can upload the charts as attachments and have done so. Now I may be able to paste text in after this. It will be long but maybe interesting.

Silly me
 

I forgot about PDF format. The complete report is attached.

?
 

Who were your control subjects?

?
 

Sorry,I should have rememberd please. Without controls the research will not be taken seriously by anyone in the scientific community

The goal
 

Knowing that I could not set up a "real" survey with controls my goal is merely to attract attention to the question. It is something that needs more resources than I could hope to command. But I do think that it shows that there is something there and potentially something big.

Dear EnglishCountryDancer

Your answer to Rick is a severe one, I find no reason to give his work such a negative a negative mark and.......then end of thread in the name of « SCIENCE ». No "good job", nothing, finished, over..a bit harsh, no?


« Ah no! young blade! That was a trifle short! You might have said at least a hundred things ,... By varying the tone. . .like this, suppose... »
..
(.........to kid you......Tirade of the nose , Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand


I found this work Rick sent me two days before a good job he had no other pretention than "give a look" and see 'what is on' and "think about it"

I have been working, among different ideas upon depression,stress and PD since 2003, two years with Rickas well before and since then, papers about stress and PD have been about cares, spouses, some about....... doctors but not one about people with PD the everyday stressors.....No article in biomedical research and no great interest for feelings and emotions, though characteristics of human evolution with intelligence in forebrain

Reply
 

No,not harsh in my view, just realistic.I appreciate what Rick is doing and I want his work taken seriously.Without controls this will not happen in the wider wider scientific community.

Rick,

This is very interesting, and I feel the information should be forwarded to the NIMH for further study. They can use this as a basis for a broarder study with the control groups that ECD mentions.

The information is definitely interesting, and as I think back to how things were in my past, I can see a lot of stress from varoius areas. We deal with them, shrug them off, and continue without a thought of what this is doing to our bodies at the time.

John

Negative
 

Whilst I do not want to be negative I have to ask the question:How do we know if PWP have experienced more stress than anyone else?