What Happens To Someone With Parkinson’s Disease?

Parkinson’s disease mainly affects the way, by which a person moves. This takes place when brain of an individual has problem with specific nerves cells. Normally, nerve cells of humans create dopamine an important chemical that sends signals to different parts of the brain to control body movements.

This chemical allows smooth movement of body muscles and lets them to do whatever they want. However, a patient of Parkinson’s disease suffers from break down of the respective nerve cells. Thus, they no longer become able to get dopamine and face difficulty in their body movements.

Parkinson’s disease patients and their body movements will go through the following stages/phases-

Tremor is the first symptom that takes place in any particular leg or arm and on only a particular side of a patient’s body. With the passage of time, tremor spreads to both sides of patients and cause a few more problems in the form of fatigue, weakness and joint pain.

When the Parkinson’s disease becomes worse, a person may experience slow movement, poor coordination and stiff muscles. He or she may even face problems while doing different tasks, such as shaving, writing or brushing of teeth. Especially, handwriting changes are common problems among patients. In addition, patients may face problems with physical balance and body posture. Along with this, such individuals may tend to walk stooped way with shuffling and quick steps.

With the consistent increase in muscle stiffness and tremor for many years, patients of Parkinson’s disease may fail to care for them. Instead, they may confine to bed or wheelchair. Other than this, dementia may develop in more than one-third of the patients in the later stages of Parkinson disease. Symptoms of dementia may include confusion, disorientation during nighttime and loss of memory.

Despite doctors and neurologists are unable to identify the actual risk factors of the Parkinson’s disease, but they have predicted following factors, which may increase the chances of any person to trap under the problem or go ahead to its further stages.

Advancing age is one of the risk factors associated with Parkinson’s disease but excluding early onset of the problem. Most instances of the disease take place after you cross 50 years age. However, illness may even take place among people in between 30 and 50 years in rare cases.

There is hardly a few people with Parkinson’s disease with any close relative has also suffered with the problem. However, in some cases, family history with typical form of Parkinson’s problem increases the risk associated with the respective problem. Family history with the problem constitutes a huge risk factor in case of its early-onset but such problem is not so much common among patients.

A few research studies have revealed that exposure to specific environmental risk factors on a long-term basis, such as harmful chemicals, pesticides or water of well may increase the risk associated with developing the Parkinson’s disease.

You do not require any urgent medical care if you deal with trembling or tremor problem only for some time. Only, you should discuss about your tremor in your next appointment with the doctor. However, if the tremor affects your daily activities or if you develop any symptom, you should schedule appointment with your doctor immediately. In this case, you should give description of your problem in writing, so that your doctor may come up with appropriate diagnosis. While writing the description, you should consider following important questions-

• Did your tremor begin gradually or all of a sudden?
• What results in making better or worsening your tremor problem?
• What are the body parts, which the tremor usually affects?
• Was there any latest change in medicines intake by you or in the dosage you intake?