Since 2010, April has been designated as Parkinson’s Awareness Month by the US Senate. The goal is to shine a spotlight on the national impact of Parkinson’s disease (PD), which affects more than one million Americans. A progressive disorder of the nervous system, PD is often marked by muscle tremors, muscle rigidity, decreased mobility, stooped posture, slow voluntary movements and a mask-like facial expression.
Parkinson’s activists been coming together for the last 17 years for the Parkinson’s Unity Walk, held annually in New York City’s Central Park at the end of April. (The 2012 event takes place on Saturday April 28th.) Now, with Parkinson’s Awareness Month surrounding it, there is a month-long effort to raise awareness and research funds. One of the driving reasons is that PD complications are the 14th leading cause of death in the US.
PD was one of the flagship conditions at PatientsLikeMe, and today we have more than 6,100 patients who report the disease. What are they doing to cope? Some of the most commonly reported treatments include prescription drugs such as Carbidopa-Levodopa (Sinemet), Ropinirole (Requip), and Rasagiline (Azilect); procedures such as Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) and acupuncture; and supplements such as CoEnzyme Q10. Click on each treatment to see how our patients rate the effectiveness, side effects, cost and more.
We also have an active Parkinson’s Disease Room in our forum, where more than 7,000 patients are discussing 12,000+ topics. To date, we’ve logged more than 100,000 forum posts about PD! What are patients talking about? Some recent threads include:
- Do you have a caring doctor?
- Dealing with sadness and stress
- Knitting: therapeutic or tortuous?
- The neglected pain of Parkinson’s
- Resigned from my job today
For more insight into living with PD, stay tuned for our interview later this week with PatientsLikeMe member Jim Atwell, author of Wobbling Home: A Spiritual Walk with Parkinson’s.