Parkinson's Disease And Genetic Disease

Parkinson's disease, also abbreviated as “PD”, is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects a person's nervous system, making them have trouble moving. A human has certain kinds of nerve cells in the brain called dopamine, these cells transmit and send signals to the brain allowing a person to control their movement. When these cells start breaking down and having problems, they cause a person to lose their control of movement, due to the lack of dopamine. PD is not a communicable disease – it doesn't spread from one person to another. Instead it is an environmental and genetic disease. Environmental disease because it can be caused by certain toxins, chemicals, or other environmental factors. And a genetic disease because if a family …show more content…
The most common symptom is a tremor, where the hands, arm, or leg starts to move vigorously, in a shaking movement that normally starts at a limb. Other signs and symptoms include slowed movement, rigid muscles, impaired posture and balance, loss of automatic movements, speech changes, and writing changes. Slowed movement (bradykinesia), is when a person's movement starts to slows down, often making the person take shorter steps, drag their feet, or even have difficulty in getting up from a chair; rigid muscles include stiffness in the muscles that can occur anywhere in the body, limiting motion range and causing pain; impaired posture and balance includes having a stooping posture or problems in balancing; loss of automatic movements includes having unconscious movements, such as smiling, moving or swings your arms when walking, or blinking; speech changes includes speaking more quickly, softly, slur or hesitating before speaking, speech also may be more monotone; and lastly writing changes is when a person may start to have a hard time writing and writing may be writing text in small print. As the disease progresses, symptoms (such as the tremors) usually spreads to the other side of the body. Over the years, the tremors and muscle stiffness increase, and the person may be unable to care for …show more content…
Medications have proven to slow down / relieve some of the symptoms of this disease, but there is no way to stop it. Some medications can even make the disease worse if taken. Since PD causes a disability, patients tend to have a shorter life span than other individuals. Unfortunately, patients are unable to recover from this particular disease. As the disease gets worse, patients can get get depression, gastrointestinal problems, problems with urination, difficulty chewing and swallowing food, memory loss, hallucinations, and dementia. As the disease continues to progress, regular checkups at the doctor are recommended, and patients are encouraged to join the support groups that are available for PD, to help them cope with their disease. During the later stages of the disease, an assistant is usually needed to help the