Parkinson's Disease From The Gut To The Brain

On a brisk winter morning last year, Ron Till, 67, sat down at his small kitchen table in Adelaide, South Australia, to read the latest quarterly newsletter that had arrived from Parkinson's South Australia.

- Suvi Mahonen

Till had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in his late 50s and his symptoms were getting worse. He had difficulty concentrating, he had lost his peripheral vision, and he could only manage a limited amount of activity each day before exhaustion overwhelmed him.

After retiring as a Telstra communications consultant two years earlier, he had spent much of his time sitting inside his brick unit, staring out the window, feeling lonely and bored.

"Parkinson's makes you lose your confidence," Till told me. "You think, 'Everybody's looking at my hands shaking.' You become more introverted."

On top of his medical woes Till and his wife had recently separated.

"It became intolerable for her," Till told me. "When I retired, my wife thought I'd be doing lots of things like going out to Men's Sheds and visiting my friends, but I never did any of that. Parkinson's made me so tired. I could do one thing, and then the rest of the day I was useless."

Little did Till know, as he sipped his mug of instant coffee that morning, that he was about to read something that would change his life.

Parkinson's disease is a combination of movement disorders including resting tremor, muscle rigidity,​ impaired balance and slowness of movement. It can also cause neurological problems such as depression, insomnia, memory loss and confusion. It is a condition that afflicts more than 80,000 Australians and causes over 100,000 deaths worldwide per year.

Its cause is unknown and likely multifactorial, but it is associated with dopamine depletion and destruction of neurons in the basal ganglia region of the brain.